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HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



HENRY WARD BEECHER 



The Shakespeare of the Pulpit 



BY 



JOHN HENRY BARROWS 

Author of " The Goipeh are I'rue Histories ^^ and"' J Bdicve 

in God.'* 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES. 




^/^ffS/ 



V 

FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY 
London and Toronto 
1893 






Copyright, 1893, by the 
FUNK & VVACiNALLS COMPANY. 



(RegUlered at Siatioaer's Hall, Londou, Eug.] 



Uo tbe Congregation 

of ipli^moutb Cburcb, JBrooftl^n, tbis Xffe of tbeir jfirst pastoc 

■ffs BeDicateD, 

witb Deep anb (Grateful Hbmiratfon of tbeir Xllnswerving 

Devotion to Ibim in tbe Uime of Ibis Sorest Urials, an^ 

witb an Equally Cor&ial appreciation of tbeir Iftoble part 

in tbose Services to 

Cbriet an& Ibumanft^, 

wbicb are irmmortallig Bssociated 
witb tbe IRame of 

Ibenr^ Mart) Beecber* 



PREFACE. 



Carlyle has called Shakespeare " the best head in 
six tliousand years." 

To Henry Ward Beecher, more frequently than to 
any one else, has the epithet Shakespearean been 
applied by men widely acquainted both with the 
poet and with the preacher. 

The pastor of Plymouth Church, the most brilliant 
and .fertile pulpit-genius of the nineteenth century, 
and the most widely-influential American of his time, 
lived so varied a life, and one so replete with impor- 
tant incidents, that it has been no holiday task to 
compress into the compass of this volume what 
needed to be written in order to furnish an adequate 
picture of this many-sided and almost myriad-minded 
man. 

I have aimed to give, in swift, flowing narrative, 
the story of his spiritual inheritance, his interesting 
early development, his various achievements, sorrows, 
and triumphs. Though " the life of such a man is 
the life of his epoch," I have not fully described all 
the reform movements through the midst of which 
flowed the current of his career. The main theme of 
this book is Mr. Beecher's richly-endowed person- 
ality, and to a large extent he has been allowed to 
speak for himself. 



via PREFACE. 

The materials which I liave found at hand, and 
wliich I have been kindly permitted by authors and 
publishers to use, have been exceedingly ample. 
The Rev. N. D. Hillis, D.D., of Evanston, Illinois, is 
the possessor of perhaps the completest Beecher 
library in the country, and this has been kindly 
placed at my service. Henry Ward Beecher had the 
fortune to have more things written about him than 
any other of his contemporaries, unless we except 
Lincoln and Gladstone. 

No brief sketch is so satisfactory as that given by 
Mrs. Stowe in " Men of Our Times " (Hartford Pub- 
lishing Company, 1868). In the " Life of Harriet 
Beecher Stowe," by her son, Charles Edward Stowe 
(Houghton, Mifflin & Company, 1889), are many 
notices of Henry Ward Beecher which are valuable 
to his biographer. 

The " Life of Beecher," by Abbott and Halliday 
(American Publishing Company, Hartford, 1887), 
contains an important sketch of Mr. Beecher by Dr. 
Lyman Abbott, his successor in Plymouth pulpit 
and in the editorship of T/ie Christian Union, now 
The Outlook. It contains also many reminiscences by 
Rev. S. B. Halliday, Mr. Beecher's beloved assistant 
in the pastoral work of Plymouth Church. This 
book, moreover, is valuable on account of the numer- 
ous contributions by distinguished contemporaries of 
the pulpit orator. I have made occasional use of 
these analyses and reminiscences, for the reason that 
Mr. Beecher can be adequately appreciated by those 
cnly who realize what a profound impression he 
made on various gifted minds. This life is also en- 
riched by many of Mr. Beecher's characteristic utter- 



PREFACE. ix 

ances, and contains a brief account of his closing 
years. 

The chief storehouse of knowledge concerning this 
remarkable man is found in the " Biography of Henry 
Ward Beecher," by William C. Beecher and Rev. 
Samuel Scoville, assisted by Mrs, Henry Ward 
Beecher (Charles L. Webster & Company, 1888, now 
owned by Bromfield & Company). In the notes I 
refer to this book as the ^' Biography." It should be 
read by all who are interested to possess a full ac- 
count of Mr. Beecher's life as seen by his own house- 
hold. In the Ladies' Home Journal for-i89i-2, Mrs. 
Beecher has furnished a series of pleasant papers on 
" Mr. Beecher as I Knew Him." They are full of in- 
teresting anecdotes, for a few of which I have been 
able to find room in this volume. 

" The Autobiography and Correspondence of Ly- 
man Beecher," two volumes, edited by Charles 
Beecher (Harper &> Brothers, 1865), must be carefully 
read by all w\\o wish to understand what Mr. Beecher 
inherited from his remarkable ancestry. 

In the Preface to " Patriotic Addresses," by Henry 
Ward Beecher (New York : Fords, Howard & Hul- 
bert, 1887), there is an admirable and discriminating 
review of Mr. Beecher's personality and influence in 
public affairs, by John R. Howard. The '^ Life of 
Henry Ward Beecher," by Joseph Howard, Jr., and 
*'The Life and Work of Henry Ward Beecher," by 
Thomas W. Knox, contain miscellaneous information, 
not elsewhere found. "The History of Plymouth 
Church," by Noyes L. Thompson (New York: G. W. 
Carleton & Company, 1873), is not without use to 
the student of Mr. Beecher's life. 



X PREFACE. 

The " Beecher Memorial," compiled and edited by 
Edwiird W. Bok, gives a great number of contem- 
porary tributes, some of which the writer has found 
of interest and value. Joseph Parker's " Eulogy " 
(New York: Bachelder & Company, 1887), is a mag- 
nificent tribute to the genius and character of his 
illustrious friend. 

A chief source of our knowledge of Henry Ward 
Beecher is the books which he published, or which 
friends hcive compiled from his writings and ad- 
dresses. Foremost among these I mention " The 
Yale Lectures on Preaching," which remain unsur- 
passed in suggestiveness and stimulating power; the 
" Lectures to Young Men," " Plymouth Pulpit Ser- 
mons," " Patriotic Addresses," containing the com- 
plete publication of Mr. Beecher's most important 
speeches on subjects connected with slavery and the 
Civil War; '* Evolution and Religion," "Norwood," 
" Comforting Thoughts," " A Book of Prayer," 
" Royal Truths," " Beecher as a Humorist," "A Sum- 
mer in England with Henry Ward Beecher," " Bible 
Studies," all of them published by Fords, Howard & 
Hulbert, and two volumes of Mr. Beecher's sermons, 
edited by Lyman Abbott and published by Harper 
Brothers. The English publication of Mr. Beecher's 
sermons (London: R. D. Dickinson) has been placed 
at my service by the kindness of Dr. Hillis, and also 
the sermons delivered during the last year of his life 
and published in T/ie Brooklyn Magazine. 

Probably the most famous of the compilations 
from Mr. Beecher's works is " Life Thoughts," which 
had an extraordinary sale. An interesting selection 
from his writings is ''The Crown of Life" (Boston: 



PREFACE. xi 

D. Lothrop Company), with Introduction by Rossiter 
W. Raymond. This Introduction contains the best 
account ever given of some of the peculiarities of 
Mr. Beecher's mind, particularly its periodicity. Mr. 
Raymond explains how Mr. Beecher's fruitful genius 
remained dormant or inactive except at special re- 
curring times, and how he brought about, with 
astonishing regularity, these periods of creative pro- 
ductiveness, which seldom lasted more than a few 
hours, but which he was usually able to make syn- 
chronous with his Sunday services. 

Some of Mr. Beecher's very best writing is found 
in the " Star Papers," first and second series, and in 
" The Life of Jesus, the Christ," the first volume of 
which was published by J^ B. Ford & Company, 187 1, 
and the second by Bromfield & Company, 1891. The 
*' Prayers from Plymouth Pulpit " (A; C. Armstrong 
& Son) must not be omitted by any student of Henry 
Ward Beecher. 

There have been many other volumes, besides 
addresses, pamphlets, reviews, and newspaper articles 
which I have consulted, and which have thrown im- 
portant side-lights on Mr. Beecher's career. 

While a student in the Union Theological Semi- 
nary in 1868 and 1869, it was my good fortune to be 
a listener to his preaching, and in what I have written 
of his unsurpassed pulpit eloquence I have freely 
drawn on my own vivid recollections. Mr. T. J. 
Ellinwood, who for so . many years reported Mr. 
Beecher's sermons, has very kindly sent me a number 
of Mr. Beecher's unpublished sentences. Mr. N. D. 
Pratt, of Chicago, a valued friend of Mr. Beecher, 
has very courteously allowed me the free use of his 



Xll PREFACE. 

unpublished reminiscences. A number of friends 
have furnished unpublished letters of interest and 
incidents connected with Mr. Beecher's remarkable 
personality. 

" Biography," says Mr. Lowell, " in these communi- 
cative days has become so voluminous that it might 
seem calculated for the ninefold vitality of another 
domestic animal than for the less lavish allotment of 
man." I hope that this book will seem to many of the 
friends of Mr. Beecher too short rather than too long. 
If it shall be deemed by those who were personally fa- 
miliar with him a truthful picture of this wonderful 
man, and if my estimate of his character and genius, 
and of the influence of his teaching, shall commend it- 
self to the judgment of fair-minded Christian readers, 
1 shall be greatly pleased. I shall be still more pleased 
if this account of a richly-gifted, heroic, and much- 
suffering servant of Christ, and apostle of humanity, 
shall kindle in other hearts a new faith in that Divine 
Redeemer, who was the strength and glory of Mr. 
Beecher's great career. 

JOHN HENRY BARROWS. 

Chicago, August ist. 1893. 



CONTENTS 



Preface ...» vii-xii 

CHAPTER I. 
The Flower of New England Womanhood 1-7 

CHAPTER H. 
The King of the New England Pulp?t 8-17 

CHAPTER HI. 
The Nurse of His Childhood 18-27 

CHAPTER IV. 
"The Father of the Man " 28-35 

CHAPTER V. 
The Boy's Peril and Escape 36-43 

CHAPTER VI. 
Amherst College and Her Greatest Son 44-54 

CHAPTER VII. 
In the Great Valley of Decision 55-68 

CHAPTER VIII. 
Testing His Weapons 69-79 

CHAPTER IX. 
Indianapolis. The Western Evangelist 80^91 

CHAPTER X. 
A Sick Household. A Strong Pulpit.. 92-103 



XIV CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER XI. 
Call to Brooklyn. Early Revivals 104-116 

CHAPTER XII. 
A Historic Church 117-131 

CHAPTER XIII. 
The Private and Peaceful Ministry 132-144 

CHAPTER XIV. . 
Revivals. Nature. Music 145-155 

CHAPTER XV. 
Causes of Popularity and Unpopularity i 156-162 

CHAPTER XVI. 
The Battle for Freedom 163-178 

CHAPTER XVII. 
The Glue of Compromise, a Quack Cement 179-188 

CHAPTER XVIII. 
A Light in America's Dark Age 189-199 

CHAPTER XIX. 
The Irrepressible Conflict Continues 200-306 

CHAPTER XX. 
The Pilgrims on the Kansas Prairies 207-2 1 4 

CHAPTER XXI, 

The Republican Party and Its Great Leaders 21 5-226 

CHAPTER XXII. 

Truth on the Scaffold, Wrong on the Throne 227-238 

CHAPTER XXIII. 
Beecher the Emancipator 239-246 



CONTENTS. XV 

CHAPTER XXIV. 
Steering by the Divine Compass 247-257 

CHAPTER XXV. 
Before the Great Storm 258-265 

CHAPTER XXVI. 
A Great Leader in a Great Crisis 266-272 

. CHAPTER XXVII. 
ToiHng for Liberty and the Union 273-286 

CHAPTER XXVIII. 
" You Wonder Why We're Hot, John .^ " 287-296 

CHAPTER XXIX. 
Conquering the Mob 297-308 

CHAPTER XXX. 
The Heart of Bruce Returns to Scotland 309-319 

CHAPTER XXXI. 
" I have fought with Beasts at Ephesus " 320-329 

CHAPTER XXXII. 

Tlie American Demosthenes Triumphs 330-344 

CHAPTER XXXIIL 

The Great War Drama Ended 345-355 

CHAPTER XXXIV. 
Blessed are the Peacemakers 356-362 

CHAPTER XXXV. 
In Labors More Abundant 363-371 

CHAPTER XXXVI. 
Sunshine Before the Storm 37--379 



XVI CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER XXXVII. 
The Long Darkness 380-390 

CHAPTER XXXVIII. 

The Son of the Righteous DeHvered 391-398 

CHAPTER XXXIX. 

A Multitude of Counselors 399-413 

CHAPTER XL. 
The Shadow Lessening 414-419 

CHAPTER XLI. 
New Light on Old Problems 420-428 

CHAPTER XLi;... 

Pulpit Thunderer and Plumed Knight , 429-434 

CHAPTER XLIII. 
Last View of the Old Battlefield 435-441 

CHAPTER XLIV. 
Night Cometh and the Eternal Morning 442-449 

CHAPTER XLV. 
" This Was a Man " 450-477 

CHAPTER XLVI. 
The Eloquent Orator 478-489 

CHAPTER XLVII. 
He Preached Christ 490-512 

CHAPTER XLVIII. 

"Securus Judicat Orbis Terrarum " 513-530 

Index 531-541 



HENRY WARD BEECHER. 



CHAPTER I. 



THE FLOWER OF NEW ENGLAND WOMANHOOD. 

More than three-fourths of a century have rippled 
"into the silent hollows of the past" since, in the 
hamlet of Litchfield, Connecticut, when the morning 
twilight of September was awaking the bird-songs in 
the elm-trees, a saintly woman, the flower of New 
England, told her weeping companion that Heaven 
drew near, and that its glories were almost over- 
whelming to her soul. On her death-bed she dedi- 
cated her sons as missionaries of Christ, and her dy- 
ing hope was fulfilled, as all of them became minis- 
ters of the Gospel. She told them that God c®uld 
do for them more than she had done, and that thev 
must put their trust in Him. In her last moments, 
her husband repeated to her the words, " But ye are 
come unto Mount Zion, and unto the city of the liv- 
ing God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumer- 
able company of angels, to the general assembly and 
church of the first-born, which are written in Heaven, 
and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just 
men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the 
new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that 



2 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

speaketh better things than that of Abel." Then in 
perfect and cloudless peace she fell asleep. 

Forty-seven years after the sods of Litchfield had 
closed over the dust of Roxana Foote Beecher, an 
old man, who had once been the king of the New 
England pulpit, but who had long been awaiting his 
departure, lay on his death-bed, in his house on 
Brooklyn Heights. Arousing from his death-torpor 
and kindling for a moment with the old electric fire, 
he cried out, *' I have fought a good fight, I have fin- 
ished my course, I have kept the faith: henceforth 
there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which 
the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that 
day." And soon after this, a solemn and divine 
radiance illumined his venerable face, and he, too, had 
gone to the general assembly and church of the first- 
born and to God the Judge of all, and to Jesus the 
mediator of the new covenant. 

Roxana Foote and Lyman Beecher inherited the 
best qualities which have ever ripened on the fruitful 
soil of New England Puritanism, and they bequeathed 
to their greatest son, Henry Ward Beecher, a bodily 
vigor which excesses, unless they were excesses of 
cerebral excitation in public speaking, never impaired, 
a rollicking good nature which was like the summer 
sunshine playing over garden and field, a profound 
melancholy which led to occasional morbid estimates 
of himself, a genius, quick and powerful to discern 
the loftiest truths, a passionate devotion to God's 
children from the highest down to the lowliest of them 
all, a muscular and elastic intellect of prodigious 
creative power, a wit that flashed like the lightning 
through the clouds and was often accompanied by 



THE FLOWER OF NEW ENGLAND WOMANHOOD. 3 

thunder-blasts of righteous wrathfulness, and an 
imagination which transformed Heaven and earth into 
a radiant procession of pictures from which he selected 
at will. 

Henry Ward Beecher was born in Litchfield, Con- 
necticut, June 24, 1813. His father had preached 
in this town since 1810. He was the ninth child, and 
the eighth then living, of Lyman Beecher and his first 
wife, Roxana Foote. The new-born infant was 
named after his uncles Henry and Ward, and the 
names were given by the grandmother, Roxana 
Foote, who was with her daughter when he was 
born. Henry Ward Beecher was eleven years the 
senior of that other leading genius of New England 
theological reform, Horace Bushnell, who first saw 
the light in the same town. 

His father and mother, as Joseph Parker has said, 
"were enough to account for any genius, for their 
spiritual life was purely aristocratic, and enough to 
account for any goodness, for they held much daily 
commerce with Heaven." Henry Ward Beecher, in a 
marked and unusual measure, was the child, not only 
of his parents, but also of his remote ancestors. There 
appears in his many-sided character and vast stores 
of physical and moral endurance scarcely a trait or 
force which may not be distinctly traced to some one 
of his known progenitors. Elisha Foote, the father of 
Roxana Foote, was a descendant from the Englishman 
who aided King Charles First to hide from his pur- 
suers in the Royal Oak which grew in afield of clover. 
For this service he was knighted, and the coat-of-arms 
for the Foote family shows an oak-tree standing in a 
clover field. 



4 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Another of the ancestors of Roxana Foote was 
Andrew Ward, one of the English gentlemen who 
sailed with John Winthrop, Thomas Dudley, Sir 
Richard Saltonstall and the Rev. George Phillips in 
the good ship Arbella, which arrived in Boston on 
June 22, 1630. Among his descendants were Colonel 
Andrew Ward who helped In the capture of Louisburg 
and who was famed for his total abstinence principles, 
and General Andrew Ward, distinguished in the 
Revolutionary struggle, and who for many years was 
regularly and without opposition chosen to the State 
Legislature of Connecticut. 

Henry Ward Beecher had the looks of his mother, 
as everyone will discern who studies the fine portrait 
of Roxana Foote which appears in the biography of 
Harriet Beecher Stowe written by her son. Not only is 
the general outline of the mother's face reproduced, but 
" the fine nose, the full eye, the mobile, sensitive mouth 
appear in both." We are told that after his moth- 
er's death, which occurred in 1816, little Henry was 
discovered under his sister Catherine's window dig- 
ging with great zeal, and when asked what he was do- 
ing he replied, " Why, I am going to Heaven to find 
mamma." 

No mother ever had sweeter things written of her 
by her children than the mother of Henry Ward 
Beecher. Catherine says of Roxana Foote that she 
had " a high ideal of excellence in whatever she at- 
tempted, and a habit of regarding all knowledge with 
reference to its practical usefulness, and remarkable 
perseverence." And Harriet writes of her mother 
that she was " a woman to make a deep impression 
on the minds of her children, There was a moral 



THE FLOWER OF NEW ENGLAND WOMANHOOD. 5 

force about her, a dignity of demeanor, and an air of 
elegance and superior breeding which produced a 
constant atmosphere of unconscious awe in the minds 
of little children." And, again, she writes that her 
" mother was one of those strong, restful, and yet 
widely sympathetic natures, in whom all around 
seemed to find comfort and repose. The communion 
between her and my father was a peculiar one; it was 
an intimacy throughout the whole range of their be- 
ing. There was no person in whose decision he had 
greater confidence and faith; intellectually and mor- 
ally he regarded her as the better and stronger por- 
tion of himself, and I remember hearing him say 
that after her death his first sensation was a sort of 
terror like that of a child suddenly shut out in the 
dark." 

She died when Henry was little more than three 
years old, so that his recollections of this remarka- 
ble woman were shadowy. And yet Mrs. Stowe 
writes: " Although my mother's bodily presence dis- 
appeared from our circle, I think that the memory 
and example of her had more influence in molding 
her family than the living presence of many mothers." 
When Henry Ward Beecher, in September, 1831, 
found the correspondence between his father and 
mother, how eagerly he sought out her letters and 
read them. " O my mother, I could not help kissing 
the letters. I looked at the paper and thought that 
her hand had rested on it while writing it. The hand 
of my mother had formed every letter which I saw, 
she had looked upon that paper, she had folded it, 
she had sent it, and I found out more of her mind 
than I ever knew before, more of her feelings, her 



6 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

piety." ' And afterwards when he came to own a 
faded picture of a flower whicli his mother's hand had 
drawn and colored, it seemed to him the most pre- 
cious art-product in the world. 

Roxana Foote appears to have been, in her way, 
quite as remarkable as Lyman Beecher. Hers was a 
more refined, meditative, and imaginative nature. 
Like the New England housewives of her time she 
could do all the labors of the home, weaving, spin- 
ning and making the clothes, as well as skillfully pre- 
paring the food. She is said to have been an adept in 
needlework. She was well acquainted with literature, 
history, and French. She could use the pencil and 
the brush, and possessed some knowledge of music. 
Unlike Lyman Beecher, she was tall and beautiful. 
Her natural timidity was so great she was never able 
to lead the woman's weekly prayer-meeting. She 
came from a distinguished family, and, though of 
Puritan blood, she was early confirmed in the Prot- 
estant Episcopal Church, the communion of which 
her parents were members. It required some inde- 
pendence of character for her family, one part of it, 
to remain loyal to King George during the Revolu- 
tionary struggle. 

She was a woman of patience and unselfishness, 
and her extraordinary resignation excited the amaze- 
ment of her husband. Mrs. Stowe reports the tradi- 
tion that she never spoke an angry word in her life. 
Henry Ward said of her, "■ There are few born to this 
. world that are her equals." " From her I received my 
love of the beautiful, my poetic temperament." And 



1 << 



Biography," p. 128. 



THE FLOWER OF NEW ENGLAND WOMANHOOD. 7 

he once declared that this imaginative temperament 
was responsible for a good deal of the heresy with 
which he was sometimes charged. From his mother 
Beecher believed that he also received simplicity and 
childlike faith in God. "My mother was an inspired 
woman who saw God in Nature as well as in the 
Book." 

Is it any wonder that his ideal of woman was so 
lofty ? His sister Catherine was a person of rare in- 
tellectual power and moral genius, who, out of her 
sorrow and study, evolved that conception of God 
which became the ruling conception in her brother's 
great ministry. His sister Harriet was a woman whom 
it is superfluous to praise, the author of one of the few 
epoch-making volumes in all literary history. His 
mother was to his affectionate remembrance an angel 
of light. He says, " I have only such a remembrance 
of her as you have of the clouds of ten years ago, 
faint, evanescent, and yet caught by imagination and 
fed by that which I have heard of her, and by what 
my father's thought and feeling of her were, it has 
come to be so much to me that no devout Catholic 
ever saw so much in the Virgin Mary as I have seen 
in my mother, who has been a presence to me ever 
since I can remember," One recalls the tribute which 
Theodore Parker paid to motherhood in his dis- 
course on Daniel Webster: " When virtue leaps 
high in the public fountain, you seek for the lofty 
spring of nobleness and find it far off in the dear 
breast of some mother who melted the snows of 
winter and condensed the summer's dew into fair, 
sweet humanity, which now gladdens the face of man 
in all the city streets." 



CHAPTER II. 

THE KING OF THE NEW ENGLAND PULPIT. 

Henry Ward Beecher was the son of his father, as 
well as of his mother, and his public speech, down to 
the last sermon of his life, abounded with eulogies of 
Lyman Beecher, who still retains, in the hearts of 
some older men now living, a place of reverent admira- 
tion and enthusiastic love never awarded to the son. 
This father of seven ministers, most of whom have 
been distinguished, was an inspiring teacher, friend, 
and guide, a man whose influence in New England 
surpassed Daniel Webster's in his prime. The more 
famous son differed from his father in so many respects 
that we are apt to overlook some striking resem- 
blances. Both were men of the warmest affections. 
Dr. Beecher loved " old President Dwight of Yale 
College as his own soul." He was a man of magnetic 
eloquence, restless energy, and great evangelical fer- 
vor. He was singularly free from jealousy and 
selfishness. Few men were ever inspired with a more 
passionate love for Christ. Believing that the great- 
est thing in the world was to " save souls," he was 
peculiarly Pauline in the fiber of his nature, and 
appears to us at times like St. Augustine, with eyes 
turned upward, a pen in his left hand and a burning 
heart in his right. 

Lyman Beecher treated his children to a surfeit of 



THE KING OF THE NEW ENGLAND PULPIT. 9 

theology, and thought of himself as a man born to 
fight error on the one side, and to readjust the expla- 
nation and defense of Calvinistic doctrine on the 
other. He was mora of a theologian, technically 
speaking, than his son — at least he thought more and 
spoke more in the line of the theologies. He was 
himself a theological reformer, and the changes which 
he championed, and which his son pushed on into 
extremer manifestations, illustrate the saying of Dr. 
Holmes: " It is impossible for human nature to remain 
permanently shut up in the highest lock of Calvin- 
ism." 

In both Lyman Beecher and his son appeared strik- 
ing eccentricities of character. Both had a humorous 
way of looking at life and great frolicsomeness of dis- 
position. The father was a dyspeptic. " From my 
earliest childhood," said Mr. Beecher in his Yale lec- 
tures, " I noticed the great watchfulness and skill with 
which he took care of himself." And this led Henry 
Ward to habitual thoughtfulness about his own health. 
It is scarcely to be wondered at that the father's 
trouble was dyspepsia, when we remember the state 
of the culinary art in New England in the early part 
of this century. Lyman Beecher writes: "We dined 
on salt pork, vegetables, and pies; corned beef, also, 
and always on Sunday a boiled Indian pudding. We 
made a stock of pies on Thanksgiving, froze them for 
winter use, and they lasted until March." There is a 
legend that on taking down the pantry of an old 
house in Connecticut, pies were found in perfect 
preservation, although the earthen dishes which had 
contained them had entirely decayed! It is possible 
that Henry Ward's occasional melancholy of spirits 



lO HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

may have been partly an inheritance from ancestors 
who had been improperly fed and whose pleasures 
were not the most wholesome and refined. Lyman 
Beecher relates what used to happen at the meetings 
of the Association of Ministers who dined at his Uncle 
Benton's: '* As soon as Aunt Benton saw them coming 
she threw the irons in the fire and ran down cellar to 
draw a pail of beer. Then the hot irons were thrust 
in, hissing and foaming. It was sweetened and the 
flip was ready. Then came pipes, and in less than 
fifteen minutes you could not see across the room." 

Although Lyman Beecher lived before anything 
American, except the Declaration of Independence, 
was likely to become cosmopolitan, he was in some 
respects second in influence only to his more famous 
son. As a preacher of the Gospel, in its commonly 
accepted sense, as a factor in the building of Christian 
institutions and as a revivalist, Lyman Beecher was 
superior to the pastor of Plymouth Church. But his 
training was more narrow, his intellectual furnishings 
far more limited. One of the famous scholars in the 
Faculty of Yale College used to speak of " the enor- 
mous illiteracy of Lyman Beecher," but this was prob- 
ably only a rough way of asserting that the standard 
of literary culture has been immensely raised since 
Lyman Beecher pursued his student life in New 
Haven. 

A few years after Andrew Ward had arrived in 
Boston, the widow Hannah Beecher with her son 
John, the first of the Beechers in New England, 
came to New Haven with the godly company who 
were the pioneers of John Davenport's important set- 
tlement. John Beecher was descended from the 



THE KING OF THE NEW ENGLAND PULPIT. II 

Sturdy Kentish yeomanry who made so deep an 
impression on English history *Mn the spacious times 
of Queen Elizabeth," and whom Charles Kingsley 
has celebrated in the brilliant and thrilling pages of 
" Westward Ho." 

The Beechers were blacksmiths, and it is said 
that the anvil of Nathaniel and David Beecher 
stood upon the stump of the famous oak under 
whose boughs Davenport preached his first ser- 
mon to the New Haven colonists. One of Henry's 
great-grandfathers married a Roberts of Welsh blood, 
and he often gave the credit of his fervid imagination 
to his Welsh ancestry. It is amusing to read that 
his great-great-grandfather, the sturdy New Haven 
blacksmith, was strong enough to lift a barrel of cider 
and drink out of the bunghole; that his great-grand- 
father Joseph, was able to lift a barrel of cider into 
a cart, and that his grandfather, David Beecher, 
could lift a barrel of cider and carry it into the cellar. 
These were athletic feats which some Hosea Biglow 
might have celebrated in a rude New England Iliad, 
and have lifted into a fragment of the fame which 
belongs to the achievements of the muscular Ajax. 

Physical strength was thus an inheritance with Henry 
Ward Beecher, although his father was exceedingly 
puny at first, and although Lyman Beecher's mother 
died with the consumption only two da)'^s after 
Lyman was born. As Henry Ward Beecher's grand- 
fathers, David and Nathaniel, smote upon their 
anvils, they little dreamed that they were nurtur- 
ing the strength in which an illustrious descendant 
was to strike at the most colossal and perilous 
iniquity that ever endangered America. Roger Sher- 



12 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

man, the Connecticut statesman and signer of the 
Declaration of Independence, used to call frequently 
on David Beecher, Lyman's father, because he was 
fond of politics and a studious reader of the only 
newspaper published in New England. Sherman 
used to say that he "always calculated on seeing Mr. 
Beecher as soon as he got home from Congress to 
talk over the particulars." David was more careless 
in his dress than his son or grandson. Henry Ward's 
Aunt Esther said that she had known him at least a 
dozen times to come in from the barn and sit down 
on a coat-pocket full of eggs, and jump up and say, 
"O wife!" 

Like Henry Ward he was fond of pets, and like 
him he suffered acutely from hypochondria, though 
not from the same causes. The grandfather was a 
dyspeptic, and would pass suddenly from hilarity 
to intense mental distress. David Beecher was five 
times married. Lyman Beecher was thrice married — 
in 1799, i8i7,and 1836 — and was the father of thirteen 
children of whom eleven survived him. 

It will thus be seen that Henry Ward Beecher's 
inheritance was rich and manifold. From father and 
mother both came strong, distinctive qualities. He 
belonged to a race which appears to have the instinct 
for reform. His ancestors who left England were 
Come-outers, so that he seems to have been a reformer 
from heredity, unlike Wendell Phillips, whose imme- 
diate ancestors were conservative and aristocratic, 
and unlike Charles Sumner, '' who was built appar- 
ently to play the part of a sovereign and an aristo- 
crat," but who filled " the office of nurse to the slave 
child." Lyman Beecher was born to preach ; that is, 



THE KING OF THE NEW ENGLAND PULPIT. 13 

he had that combination of energy, fervent emotive- 
ness, and logical power which makes the effective 
preacher ; and he was also a reformer, that is, as he 
said, " when I saw a rattlesnake in my path I killed 
it." Neither father nor son went out of his way, like 
some of the radical and far-seeing reformers of our 
time, to hunt rattlesnakes. But neither of these men 
ever turned aside from the venomous beasts which 
they encountered. 

In Lyman Beecher there was something of 
the catholic spirit which his son developed into 
such cosmical proportions. He preached for eleven 
years in East Hampton, on Long Island. When 
a Methodist preacher came into that village by 
the Sound, which was Lyman Beecher's first parish, 
and expected, by his fervent evangelism, to make an 
inroad upon the staid Presbyterian congregation of 
the place, the officers of the Church were sorely 
alarmed by his advent. But Lyman Beecher decided 
to act with vigorous friendliness in this matter, and 
went directly to the house where the itinerant 
preacher lodged, gave him the heartiest welcome, an 
unusual act of courtesy in those days of intense 
denominationalism, and insisted on his preaching in 
the village church. This he did without making any 
very deep impression. The first sermon was the last. 

Lyman Beecher said of himself: '^ I was made for 
action, the Lord drove me on, but I was ready. I 
have always been going at full speed." There were 
times when this was preeminently true of Henry 
Ward Beecher, but, fortunately for the world, he had 
in his nature an element of reposefulness, not to say 
of apparent physical indolence, by which his life was 



T4 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

prolonged in spite of the tremendous excitements 
which he underwent and the even more wearing 
trials which came to him in the height of his fame. 
Lyman Beecher thought that the law and the doc- 
trine, without any accompanying explanations, were 
a rude and cruel way of getting souls into the King- 
dom. He had firm confidence in his own power to 
elucidate the mysteries of Scripture and experience, 
and to adapt Biblical truth to the varying wants of 
individual souls. He even believed that if Lord 
Byron could have had the advantage of his personal 
explanations of truth, that acrid and erratic son of 
genius might have been guided into brighter and 
better paths. One of Lyman Beecher's peculiarities 
was this, that he was almost intoxicated by the crash 
and roar of thunder. It is uncertain whether thunder 
produced any powerful effect on Henry Ward Beecher, 
but he was fond of making it himself, and Dr. 
Richard S. Storrs says of him that he wasted enough 
breath in unnecessary noise during his public speak- 
ing to make two or three good sized thunder-storms! 
In the sturdy frame of Henry Ward Beecher, when 
under the greatest excitement, there was a titanic 
strength of emotion, an emotion more volcanic than 
his father's, which made him indeed the Jupiter of 
the pulpit and the worthy successor of those ancient 
orators of Athens, 

"Whose resistless eloquence 
Wielded at will that fierce democraty, 
Shook the arsenal, and fulmined over Greece, 
To Macedon and Artaxerxes's throne." 

New England children, at the beginning of this 



THE KING OF THE NEW ENGLAND PULPIT. 15 

century and earlier, were permitted to play on Sun- 
day evening as soon as they could see three stars. 
Lyman Beecher relates that playing one Sunday eve- 
ning, he was too impatient to wait for the three lights 
in the heaven, and when one of his boy friends saw 
him and said " That's wicked, there aint three stars," 
he replied, " Don't care." "God says you mustn't." 
"Don't care." "He'll punish you." "Well if He 
does I'll tell Aunt Benton." "Well He's bigger than 
Aunt Benton and He'll put you in the fire and burn 
you up for ever and for ever." And Lyman Beecher 
relates that this took hold of him. He understood 
what fire was and what for ever was. "What emotion 
I had, thinking, no end, no end! It's been a sort of 
mainspring ever since." This incident will show 
what an enormous change has come over the pre- 
vailing orthodox preaching of our time. Endlessness 
of suffering was, with Henry Ward Beecher, subor- 
dinate to the infinity of God's love as an incentive 
to accept the Gospel and as a mainspring of Christian 
activity. 

The great modern apostle of love, who was also the 
greatest American preacher of righteousness, came 
into the world on the day which honors St. John the 
Baptist, who made Herod and the Pharisees tremble. 
The ten years of American history extending from 
1805 to 1815 witnessed the births of a group of men 
and women foreordained to become illustrious in 
the great anti-slavery struggle, or in that Civil War 
"which bound the Union and unbound the slave." 
Garrison was born in 1805, John G. Whittier and 
Robert E. Lee in 1807, Salmon P. Chase and Jefferson 
Davis in 1808, Abraham Lincoln in 1809, Theodore 



l6 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Parker in 1810, Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, 
Horace Greeley and Harriet Beecher in 181 1, Alex- 
ander Stephens in 1812, Henry Ward Beecherin 1813, 
and Edwin M. Stanton in 1814. Some curious and 
prophetic angel might have made, during the consul- 
ates of Jefferson and Madison, a most interesting 
collection of children, destined to immortal celebrity 
in American annals, but probably no human eyes 
could have foreseen the momentous struggle, both 
moral and military, in which these children were 
destined to act such various and conspicuous parts. 
Few of these were foreordained to lives so interesting 
and commandingly influential, over both political and 
religious developments, as Henry Ward Beecher. 

We may sum up the account and record of ancestral 
influences by noting the fact that he seemed to be 
a compound of opposite characteristics. The most 
earnest was the most playful of men; the most 
cheerful was at times the most despondent; the most 
devoted and unselfish was occasionally stiffly inde- 
pendent. Though possessing many of the elements 
of conservatism, like Milton and Lowell, though 
loving the retirement of Nature, tlie companionship 
of books and long periods of quiet observation and 
meditation, he had all the strongest instincts of the 
reformer and was the flaming Jupiter of American 
anti-slavery orators. Along many lines of vitality 
he inherited all the chief characteristics of the 
English-speaking race in every one of its branches. 
He had not only the blood of Wales with its fervid 
intensity, he had also an inheritance of Scottish blood, 
and there was in him the marvelous persistency and 
a determination to carry every undertaking through 



THE KING OF THE NEW ENGLAND PULPIT. 17 

to success which is supposed to be distinctly an 
English trait. The Puritan and the Cavalier were 
both in his veins and in his mind. With playfulness 
and domesticity of spirit was conjoined a grave and 
all-absorbing earnestness. The Shakespeare of the 
pulpit was an enthusiastic student of the prose and 
poetry of Milton, from the reading of whom he 
fashioned, to a certain degree, his nobler style in the 
greater passages of his eloquence. He belongs, and 
will ultimately be seen to belong, to the English race 
in all the continents. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE NURSE OF HIS CHILDHOOD. 

During the sixteen years in which Dr. Beecher 
preached at Litchfield he became one of the foremost 
men of New England. And while this indefatigable 
teacher of righteousness was delivering great ser- 
mons against Intemperance, or on the Building up 
of the Waste Places, thereby setting in motion 
reforms whose current is sweeping us forward to-day, 
Henry Ward Beecher was finding Litchfield the 
rough and wholesome nurse of his childhood. 

There is something pathetic and almost melancholy 
in the chans^es which have come over manv of the 
smaller towns of New England. Professor Park has 
written, in his recollections of Dr. Emmons, of this 
pensive interest which has been " thrown over the 
places which have been distinguished as the residence 
of our ablest divines. Most of them are rural villages, 
where the stillness of the Sabbath reigns from day to 
day, and where but few relics remain of the great- 
ness which has left them. Formerly they were the 
seats of the oracle. The voice which went out from 
these retired villages was heard and obeyed in our 
own land and in Britain. But now the scepter has 
departed from these churches, and the lawgiver from 
among them, and grass has grown up in the paths 
once trod by the masters in our Israel." 



THE NURSE OF HIS CHILDHOOD. I9 

Litchfield, however, will always be interesting as the 
town where Lyman Beecher preached the Gospel with 
such life-giving power, and as the birthplace of his two 
most famous children. Like Bethlehem, it is in the hill 
country, a mountain town, a thousand feet above the 
level of the ocean. Beautiful and delightful in the 
summer, it is made dreadful through the long winter 
with ice and snow and cold. " This portion of verte- 
brate New England is so roundly covered with strong 
soil, so veined with well-fed water-courses, and 
clothed upon with rich verdure, that its wild beauty 
is redeemed from all harshness. The very air breathes 
vigor and purity."^ 

To know the springs of American civilization we 
must know the New England town, and Litchfield is 
one of the best examples of that chiefest of American 
institutions. It is said of the people of this region 
that they were unusually enterprising. " They made 
good turnpike roads; opened schools and academies; 
started manufactures, and made their law-school a 
prominent seat of constitutional training whence came 
some of the best lawyers of the country." During 
the Revolutionary war the town had been distin- 
guished for its patriotism, and, like Washington at 
Mount Vernon, it sent contributions to beleaguered 
Boston in the solemn times of the Port Bill. It had 
the honor of molding into forty thousand bullets 
the statue of George the Third, which had been car- 
ried from Bowling Green in New York to this moun- 
tain village. 

When Henry Ward Beecher revisited Litch- 
field, in his forty-fourth year, he recalled most 
vividly the early days and scenes. Some of the old 

* "Life and Letters of Horace Buslinell," pp. 3-4. 



20 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

houses were still standing, the old store, the bank, 
and the jail; and there were the old familiar trees; 
and the names of the residents along the chief streets 
were not forgotten. And we think of some of the 
scenes which he has portrayed in " Norwood," when 
he speaks of the greatest man in town, who 
owned the stables, and of the wittiest, who was 
the stage-driver. " In that temple which boys' 
imagination makes, a stage-proprietor and stage- 
driver stand forth as grand as Minerva in the Par- 
thenon of true piety and devotion to the highest 
things!" 

Litchfield was a good town for such a boy to 
be born in, and Henry Ward was always thankful 
that the early measuring lines of life had fallen to 
him in such delightful places, where the society was 
of no mean order, where the law-school and the 
boarding-school gave some little intellectual dignity 
to the community, and where his early environment 
was such that he did not become acquainted in a 
practical way with wickedness. It is worth remember- 
ing that he records his youthful unsulliedness, and 
that he grew up pure as a woman. The moral atmos- 
phere of Litchfield must have been far more whole- 
some and invigorating than that of many other New 
England towns. We know that Professor Phelps 
recorded his protest against the vulgarity of the 
average country-district school. '' The innocence of 
rural life was not illustrated in m}^ early surround- 
ings. I never found afterwards in colleges or in cities 
such corrupting or vulgarizing influences." 

They are pleasant pictures which have been given us 
of Henry Ward Beecher's early life. We find him a 



THE NURSE OF HIS CHILDHOOD. 2L 

healthy-minded, interesting, thoroughly boyish, and 
affectionate boy, humiliated, like many other boys, 
when compelled to wear an overcoat on coldest days. 
We see him, when only nine years old, harnessing the 
horse to the sled and taking great pride, on a wintry 
day, in bringing home a barrel of water from an icy 
brook three miles distant. The disposition to do hard 
things and take great comfort in them was a family 
trait. 

Henry Ward's mother died when he was three. Mrs. 
Stowe writes that Henry was too small to go to the 
funeral, and she remembers his golden curls and little 
black frock as he frolicked in the sun. In the autumn 
of 1817, Lyman Beecher brought to the Litchfield 
parsonage, as his second wife. Miss Harriet Porter, of 
Portland, Maine. The coming of the second mother 
was of course a memorable event in the household, 
and fortunately not one which brought with it a 
shadow. The new mother's heart was at once drawn 
out to the children, who seemed to her amiable and 
bright and also possessed of fine capacities and good 
taste for learning. This was certainly true of William, 
Edward, Catherine, and George, and the younger 
children appeared to her lovely and affectionate. 
But the second mother, while serene, beautiful and 
accomplished, was one who inspired awe in view of 
her goodness, rather than cheerful and enthusiastic 
love. Young Henry was disposed to shrink from her 
as being a saint of whose affection little transgressors 
were unworthy. He has left numerous praises of her 
fidelity, and has spoken strongly of the deep impression 
she made upon him; but he could not open his young 
heart to her in fullest confidence. Referring to 



22 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

his devotions with her, he said: "I always felt 
when I went to prayer as though I was going into a 
crypt where the sun was not allowed to come, and I 
shrank from it." She did not represent that kind of 
Christian experience which was to open his heart to 
the glory and beauty of religion. 

But other influences, more helpful, were brought to 
bear upon his awakening thought. Old Aunt Esther, 
with her numberless stories and her wonderful read- 
ings from the Bible, was a radiant and cheerful pres- 
ence in the young boy's life and also in his after 
recollections of childhood. When an old man Mr. 
Beecher spoke most tenderly of her great influence 
over him, and, with tears rolling down his cheeks, he 
read to his family the matchless, immortal story of 
Joseph, as she was accustomed to read it in the old, 
old days when he lived his young life of mirth and 
melancholy in the gloomy parsonage of Litchfield. 
This experience was not solitary and peculiar. Hugh 
Miller recalls how his mind was awakened by that 
most delightful of all narratives, the history of Jo- 
seph, which showed him that " the art of reading was 
the art of finding stories in books." 

Mr. Beecher has often spoken of the colored 
man who was a laborer on his father's farm, the 
Charles Smith in whose room he slept and whose 
joyful piety made upon his heart such a last- 
ing impression. From him he learned in some 
measure what may be the overflowing gladness 
and thanksgiving of prayer. And more even than 
from his father he learned from this man, as he saw 
him reading from his Bible, while he talked about it 
to himself and to his God, what it is to rejoice con- 



THE NURSE OF HIS CHILDHOOD. 23 

tinually and heartily in the Lord. In a remarkably 
luminous analysis of the distinctive types of religious 
character which shaped Beecher's boyhood, Rev. Frank 
S. Child of Fairfield, Connecticut, has shown that 
Mr. Beecher's mother stands for the spiritual in relig- 
ious life, that the stepmother stands for the disciplinary^ 
that the colored servant stands for the practical, and 
that Lyman Beecher stands for the intellectual. Added 
to all this was the great impersonal service of Nature. 
While his second mother, a woman of great intel- 
ligence and unyielding conscientiousness, w-as ac- 
customed to show the children their faults and to 
pray for them and to insist upon cheerful and im- 
mediate obedience, the father introduced into the 
family life a large degree of playfulness. " The great 
barn of a structure, the rooms scattered about here 
and there," for such was the Litchfield parsonage, 
was a home where Dr. Beecher was wont to frolic and 
play all sorts of pranks with his children. It is true 
that the frolicsome divine sometimes held the rod in 
his hand, and made his children feel that he suffered 
more than they did when he was compelled to use it, 
but Henry, and his brother Charles, who was his daily 
companion in his early years, were not often 
"switched." Unlimited amounts of fun came into 
their lives; the only work required was in helping to 
take care of the garden and the house, and carrying 
in and piling up the wood. When summertime with 
its innumerable delights arrived the father was accus- 
tomed to carry them off with him on fishing-parties 
to the little neighboring pond, and they talked theol- 
ogy on the way and held good-natured discussions 
on the greatest and smallest themes. 



24 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Far from accurate is the remark of the least wise and 
careful of American infidels that "Henry Ward Beecher 
was born in a Puritan penitentiary of which his father 
was one of the wardens " and that " the natural 
desires ungratified, the laughter suppressed, the logic 
browbeaten by authority, the humor frozen by fear 
of many generations, were in this child!" Harriet 
Beecher thought her child-life happy, and probably 
there was never an American home in which freer 
play was given to the emotions, or where humor and 
hilarity were more continually manifested than in the 
home of Lyman Beecher. In his mature life he said: 
" There is not a place in the old Litchfield house 
where I was born that is not dear to my eye, and my 
heart blessed the old house for all that it had in it; 
for all the care it had had, for all its sweet associa- 
tions. It was stained through with soul color. It 
was full, as it were, with the blood of life."^ 

The presence of boarders in the great house helped 
out the meager salary of eight hundred dollars a year 
on which Lyman Beecher, patriarch as well as apostle, 
was to feed, clothe, and educate the most remarkable 
and '' brainy " lot of children that ever came to an 
American family. There were also frequent parties 
in the Litchfield manse, and the piano was always 
going and songs daily sounded from the parlor win- 
dows of this "Puritan penitentiary." 

Henry Ward has written much of the deepest 
shadow which brooded over his childhood, the Cate- 
chism, which he could not learn, and he said some 
extravagantly abusive things of that marvelous 



' "Yale Lectures on Preaching," Vol. II., p. 251. 



THE NURSE OF HIS CHILDHOOD. 25 

abridgment of doctrine, the learning of which was 
bone and muscle to many of the sturdier and stronger 
minds of New England. In an address made before 
the London Congregational Board in 1886, Beecher 
said : *' I went through all the colic and anguish of 
hyper-Calvinism when I was quite young. Happily 
my constitution was strong. I regard the old hyper- 
Calvinism as the making of as strong minds as are ever 
met on the face of this earth, but I think it kills five 
hundred where it makes one." "When I was a boy 
eight years old and upwards, I knew as much about 
decrees, foreordination, election, reprobation, as you 
do now. I used to be under a murky atmosphere, and 
I said to myself, *0! if I could only repent, then I 
should have a Saviour.' " 

But though Mr. Beecher was always exaggera- 
ting, because he felt so deeply, the unfortunate 
influences which were ill-adapted to his own case, 
he gratefully remembered what his father's dis- 
position and character wrought for his early 
training. He was greatly impressed by his father's 
self-restraint under provocation, and he recalls how 
Dr. Beecher permitted a man of violent temper to 
scold him to his heart's content, and then, asking the 
privilege of saying a word in reply, he answered his 
violent critic so thoroughly as to entirely change his 
mind. Henry was greatly influenced by the unshrink- 
ing courage of the father in trying circumstances. 
Dr. Beecher acted on the principle that if a thing were 
difficult of doing, that was the reason why he should 
do it ; and his father's pluck was often an incentive 
which greatly helped the son during the severe trials 
of his Western ministry. 



26 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

When ten years of age Henry's appearance, as 
described by his sister Harriet, was that of a stocky, 
strong boy, dutiful, unquestioningly obedient, accus- 
tomed to patient work, and inured to hearing and 
discussing the great problems of Calvinism. There 
was great freedom and independence permitted in 
Dr. Beecher's "penitentiary.'' The father was too 
busy with preaching and the mother too busy with 
her children to give any one child great attention. 
"The uncaressing, let-alone system" doubtless helped 
to those habits of self-reliance for which all the 
Beechers were distinguished. But, while Henry's 
early development was marked in the ways already 
noted, there is a certain barrenness in his childhood 
which must be felt by those who reflect how many 
appliances are now used to make children happy. 
Thanksgiving was the chief holiday, and that was 
marked as a day of excessive feeding. The delights 
of Christmas and New Year's time were not known, 
nor the more refined festivities which accompany the 
Easter rejoicings in our Churches. The absence of 
toys and gifts and choice children's literature from 
those early days has been noted. It is probable that 
the children of a well-to-do American family receive, 
at a single Christmas-time, more good literature than 
ever came into the hands of the young Beechers at 
Litchfield. 

But little was made of children in those days ; 
they were personally insignificant compared with 
the boys and girls who rule our households now ; 
and, in the case of Henry Ward Beecher, there 
was added the pain which springs from bashfulness, 
sensitiveness, and from indistinct speech. His Aunt 



THE NURSE OF HIS CHILDHOOD. 2^ 

said: "When Henry is sent to me with a message, I 
always have to make him say it three times. The 
first time I have no manner of an idea any more than 
if he spoke Choctaw; the second, I catch now and 
then a word; and the third time, I begin to under- 
stand." The time was to come when Henry Ward 
Beecher was to speak with no uncertain sound, and 
when the whole English-speaking world was to hear! 



CHAPTER IV. 



THE FATHER OF THE MAN. 



Henry Ward Beecher began going to school when 
he was only four years of age. He used to walk to 
Ma'am Kilbourn's school with his sister Harriet, and, 
when there, would sit daily on the bench, kicking his 
heels in weary idleness and saying over the dreary 
letters twice a day. Still he was out of the way, and, 
with people as busy as the Beechers, this meant a 
great deal. Mrs. Stowe writes:^ "He was my two 
years junior, and nearest companion out of seven 
brothers and three sisters. I taught him drawing 
and heard his Latin lessons." He was never a prom- 
ising learner of lessons, and his first school, where 
the hours went slowly by and where the big girls 
sawed off with tin shears some of his long golden 
curls, was not a youthful paradise. 

From this school he went to the district schoolhouse, 
where the exercises were daily readings from the Bible 
and the Columbian Orator, with " sums " from the Ele- 
mentary Arithmetic and the practice of handwriting. 
The switch and the ferule were a part of the teacher's 
armory, but they gave no such misery as the long 



^ LeUer to George Eliot (" The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe,' 
p. 475). 



*' THE FATHER OF THE MAN." 29 

weariness and agony of the constant effort to keep 
still. 

Mr. Beecher has given a picturesque description 
of tlie district schoolhouse, the small, square pine 
building, blazing in the sun, with a huge pile of wood 
before it in the winter and piles of chips in the sum- 
mer. We cannot withhold our sympathy from the 
boy whose restless legs kept swinging under the seat, 
and we can almost hear the voice of the master, when, 
bringing his hickory ferule down on the desk, he 
roars out " Silence." We hear the occasional laugh 
and the not infrequent slap, and we realize some of 
the beneficent changes which have made the school- 
rooms to-day delightful to many, if not to most, of 
our children. Mr. Beecher tells us that he and his 
fellow sufferers felt thankful to every meadow-lark 
which came into sight, and envied the flies more than 
anything else, unless it were the birds which were 
glimpsed through the open windows. 

Henry's progress was not satisfactory. His back- 
wardness was due not so much to his lack of verbal 
memory or to any mental dullness, as to the methods 
of teaching which then prevailed. He was taken to 
Mr. Brace's select school in Litchfield for one year, 
and then, when ten years of age, was sent to the 
school of the Rev. Mr. Langdon in the town of 
Bethlehem a few miles away. He remained there 
only a year, having acquired from his early experi- 
ences a distaste for school-life and for prescribed 
study. But he had splendid opportunities for roam- 
ing through field and wood, even though he made but 
slight progress in his books and was a wretchedly bad 
speller and even '' cribbed " his Latin recitations. He 



30 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Studied Nature with a gun over his shoulder, even 
though he made but little advancement in learning 
the tongue of the military masters of the ancient 
world. 

Though he had no pleasant recollections of his 
earlier school-days, we find it agreeable to recall 
his first theological battle. At the private school in 
Bethlehem one of the schoolboys, older than most of 
them, paraded the objections to the Bible which he 
had drawn from the reading of Paine's *' Age of 
Reason." But Henry Ward, believing that he was 
wrong, replied to him thoroughly. After making 
careful preparation by the study of Watson's " Apol- 
ogy," he challenged the big boy to a discussion, and 
by the acclamations of his schoolfellows he was hailed 
as victor in the debate. 

Four schools had now been tried with indifferent 
success. It was thought wise by his persevering pa- 
rents to try also the fifth. Henry was sent to Hartford, 
where his oldest sister Catherine was teaching. He 
tarried there only six months, having gained consider- 
able distinction as a small specimen of perpetual 
motion. He.also won repute by his remarkable ability 
in giving provokingly funny or deliberately wrong 
answers. He returned'^home with the reputation of 
being a poor scholar, a great joker, and a boy who 
had much within him that might yet be developed. 

While the outer manifestations of his life up to this 
time were those of an irrepressible, effervescent and 
fun-loving boy, there was beneath all a poetic, yearn- 
ing, and even melancholy spirit. In this respect the 
child was conspicuously " the father of the man." 
This growing, healthy, hungry, curious-minded, 



*' THE FATHER OF THE MAN." 3I 

prankish boy, who fondly loved the good things which 
Nature furnished in winter and summer, found his 
best schooling out of doors. Throughout his life he 
had great sympathy with the sentiment expressed in 
Lowell's lines : 

" Merely to bask and ripen is sometimes 
The student's wiser business ; the brain 
That forages all climes to line its cells, 
Ranging both worlds on lightest wings of wish. 
Will not distil the juices it has sucked 
To the sweet substance of pellucid thought. 
Except for him who hath the secret learned 
To mix his blood with sunshine, and to take 
The winds into his pulses." 

Though dull at first to ordinary book-knowledge, 
the clouds and the elms, the birds and the ponds and 
the trout-streams found Henry a good scholar. He 
knew where to see the squirrels and find the sweet- 
flag, the sassafras bushes, the chestnuts, and the hick- 
ories. His attachment to old Litchfield was mainly 
an attachment to what Nature showed to him there. 
He loved the hills and the majestic trees which the 
storms beat upon fiercely through the long, cold winter 
and gently caressed in the warm summer days. And 
Litchfield was a wholesome and breezy height for a 
strong boy's early experiences. What he saw and 
felt and dreamed and did was a prophecy of his 
own wholesome, many-sided, unconventional, and far- 
reaching life. " His strong, tireless, responsible, mag- 
nificent physique dates its notable beginning to the 
air, sunshine, freedom, and healthfulnessof the Litch- 
field hill-tops." ' 



^ Rev. Frank S. Child's " Boyhood of Beecher," p. 29. 



32 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

"With the innocent abandon of childhood, he flung 
himself upon the bosom of Mother Nature, and 
drew priceless inspiration from her love-work. And 
seasons mattered little to the observant child of 
Nature. The wild storms of December made their 
own strange revelations to his awakened fancy. The 
crystal snow-flake and the glittering icicle turned 
him into keen inquisitor. The rough usage of the 
winds, when they wrestled with him amid the snow- 
drifts, schooled him into rugged endurance. He 
heard strange voices through the storms — he caught 
the dissolving pictures of shy faces in the frost-work. 
The besparkled trees of February thaw — the myriad- 
colored forests of October — the delicate greens of the 
nascent leaves in May-time — they were all cherished 
by this devotee of Nature, and their suggestiveness 
had large share in fashioning the current of his 
thought." ' 

But the chief facts of all life reach down to those 
deep verities on which religion is built. That is not 
first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and 
yet into these early days came serious and lasting 
impressions. In 1817, his stepmother wrote: " Our 
religious privileges are very great. Church meetings 
are interesting, and our domestic worship very 
delightful. We sing a good deal, and have reading 
aloud as much as we can." ^ Rev. Thomas K. Beecher 
records that the family prayers propagated the 
ancestral religion in his brother, though they failed 
to hand down the ancestral theology.' Henry had a 



' " Boyhood of Beecher," p. 27. 

^ " Autobiography of Lyman Beecher," Vol. I., p. 369. 

' " Biography," p. 91. 



" THE FATHER OF THE MAN." 33 

sensitive conscience, and when, in anger, he once 
uttered a protane oath, he was so deeply impressed 
with his guilt that he believed his soul was lost for 
ever. When his stepmother heard the bell tolling the 
death of some villager, she said, " Henry, what do you 
think when you hear that?" "I think, was that soul 
prepared ? It has gone to eternity." Beecher, the 
man, did not believe that he was greatly guilty for 
the small sins of childhood; and religion came to him 
not so much through an experience or consciousness 
of sin, as through the bright revelation of heavenly 
love. 

Sunday was not altogether a cheerful day in his 
early life. The coming on of Saturday night was a 
serious thing. It appeared to him that the frogs 
croaked more dismally then. Every kind of work 
had to be finished before Sunday dawned. The 
children must be made clean and the boys' Sunday 
pockets purged of such temptations as knives, marbles, 
and fish-hooks. Beecher was not always consistent 
in his memories of early impressions ; and doubtless 
those impressions were twofold, and both sides of 
them were vivid in his mind. " I admire Sunday, I 
admire the old Jewish Sabbath, and I think New 
England owes much to it. One of the sweetest of 
my reminiscences is that of the old breezy hilltop in 
Litchfield on Sunday ; of the Sunday sun, and the 
Sunday birds, and the Sunday shimmering Mount 
Tom, and the Sunday elm-trees, and the Sunday 
scenes, some of which were touching and some ludi- 
crous. As I recall it Sunday was a great moral power." \ 



^ " Yale Lectures on Preaching," Vol. Til., p. 232. 
3 



34 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

If we would know his full thought of the New England 
rest-day and its wonderful influence over his early life, 
we must recall what he says of it in " Norwood." " It 
is worth all the inconveniences arising from the 
occasional over-action of New England Sabbath 
observance to obtain the full flavor of the New Eng- 
land Sunday. But for this, one should have been 
born there ; should have found Sunday already 
waiting for him." " Over all the town rested the 
Lord's peace. The saw was ripping away yesterday 
in the carpenter-shop and the hammer was noisy 
enough. To-day there is not a sign of life there. 
The anvil makes no music to-day, the mill is silent, 
only the brook continues noisy. In yonder pine 
woods what a cawing of crows ! Sunday is the birds' 
day, and the]'' will have their own democratic worship." 
But Sunday hours in church were not altogether 
cheerful with him ; his animal spirits were too vigor- 
ous to be easily or perfectly restrained, and the 
preaching availed him but little until after he was 
fifteen years old. And yet he says that "it did its 
work upon the imagination if not upon the reason." 
When he was twelve years of age there sprang up a 
revival in Litchfield, in the progress of which the 
famous Mr. Nettleton assisted Lyman Beecher. 
Henry's mind did not easily open to the religious 
teaching then prevalent and popular, and no deep 
impressions appear to have been made upon him 
although he was disposed to serious thought. He 
got hold of some things in the services which he 
attended, and truth, especially in its speculative parts, 
was lodged in his mind. Though he had no vices, 
he came at last, like many other persons under simi- 



" THE FATHER OF THE MAN. 35 

lar training, to think himself a great sinner and he 
imagined that he was not " elected." 

Greatly moved by the tolling of the bell which 
announced the funeral of a companion, he needed 
such quieting and encouraging influence as a wise and 
sympathetic Christian, lik^ his own mother, might 
have given him. He did not think, in later years, 
that the mercy of God was preached to him in his 
youth. He supposed he was writhing under sin, and 
he thought he was on the way toward co?iversion. As 
yet, however, he knew not God as the all-loving 
Father who loved the sinner in spite of his sin. '' He 
is thus early groping, unresting, and unsatisfied ; 
but it is among mountains and not in marshes and 
quicksands. Some day these mountain truths, among 
which he now wanders in darkness, shall be radiant in 
his sight with divine compassion, and his gloom shall 
give place to abiding love, joy, and peace." ^ He 
thought that a converted sinner might be saved, but 
for a '' poor, miserable, faulty boy that pouted, and 
got mad at his brothers and sisters and did a great 
many naughty things there was no salvation." A 
new and greater world, however, and new and larger 
experiences were about to dawn on his unfolding life. 



Biography," p. 8i. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE boy's peril AND ESCAPE. 

The great Unitarian controversy was raging in New 
England. The old Churches in Eastern Massachu- 
setts had been torn from their foundations. Harvard 
College was in the possession of the Unitarians. The 
American Unitarian Association was formed in 1825. 
There was crying need that Dr. Lyman Beecher, the 
most eloquent orthodox minister of his time, should 
leave his Litchfield parsonage for the strife and tur- 
moil of Boston, where the bones of the Puritan Fath- 
ers rested and '' where the crown had been torn from 
the brow of Jesus." A champion, able to meet the 
forces of theological error, was required in the very 
thick of that momentous battle. Therefore, in 1826, 
Dr. Beecher accepted an invitation to become pastor 
of the Hanover Street Congregational Church at the 
North End of Boston. There he flamed forth for 
six years and a half. During four of these years his 
scholarly son, Edward, was in the famous Park Street 
Church. 

Lyman Beecher had a great following in the 
Puritan metropolis. He did not slay and exter- 
minate heresy, and Theodore Parker did not root up 
or pull down New England orthodoxy. But Lyman 
Beecher was a great bulwark in defense of evangelical 



THE BOY S PERIL AND ESCAPE. 37 

truth and he certainly exercised a tremendous 
influence over some of the greatest minds of that time. 
The Rev. Dr. Henry M. Storrs, writing of Wendell 
Phillips says: " It is one of the facts of Phillips's life, 
not mentioned now, so far as I have seen, that, born 
and educated, and having in Boston his social and 
intellectual habitat, in circles that sneered at ortho- 
doxy and hated it, he was led to hear Lyman Beecher, 
then freshly come from Litchfield, in his masterly 
expoundings of evangelical truth, discriminated from 
Unitarian misrepresentation on the one side, and from 
hyper-Calvinistic travesties of it on the other, and 
that, having heard and become convinced, he came out, 
gave himself to Christ and was recognized as a convert 
to Christ Jesus our Lord, as his personal Redeemer. 
. . . Of all that Lyman Beecher did in his great Bos- 
ton work, what one item was of more account to after 
ages than this individual conversion of that one young 
man?" 

Thus Henry Ward, a healthy lad of thirteen, found 
himself in new and strange surroundings. Though 
the wholesome domestic life of the Beecher house- 
hold was unchanged, though father and mother and 
brothers were about him, he was ushered into a new 
and perilous experience. While the spiritual life of 
the family was intensified by theological controver- 
sies, Henry found himself in the midst of novel sights 
and scenes which made a deep impression on his 
wondrously impressible nature. Many of these 
impressions were wholesome. He has told us what 
effect upon his senses and glowing imagination was 
produced by the church-bells of Boston, and espe- 
cially by the mysterious and wonderful chimes. 



38 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

And then there was the first sight of the ships, and of 
the great sea, and the smell of the sea-air, and the ever- 
continuing delight of wandering about the wharves 
and boarding the newly arrived vessels. How incred- 
ible it would then have seemed to this boy that the 
time was coming, when he, a man of fifty, was to look 
on Boston from the sea, returning from England where 
he had served his country, in her hour of danger, by 
unparalleled oratorical achievements. And there 
was the weekly visit to Charlestown and the Navy 
Yard; there were the long rows of cannon and the 
mounted sea-battery, and the recollections of naval 
adventures and dreams of wonderful things far away 
across the sea. The open fields had been exchanged for 
the imprisoning house-walls and the ram's-horn streets 
of Boston, but the sea gave him outlook, and lured his 
mind as it has lured so many other daring and imag- 
inative spirits, into the strange realms which the 
ocean both hides and reveals. He had an almost 
irrepressible desire for breaking away. His studies 
were not congenial to him; he had been sent to the 
Boston Latin School on School Street, that famous 
nursery of distinguished men, which Sumner had just 
left, and Phillips was about to leave, for Harvard 
College. 

The entreaties of his father and mother, the fear 
of being disgraced and his religious sense of obli- 
gation led him to a dogged sort of fidelity in learning 
prescribed tasks, but the Latin School " was to him a 
grim, Sinaitic desert." He was more at home among 
the bobolinks and huckleberry bushes than among 
the keen, studious, and masterful intellects of the 
Boston school. " His life was a desolation, a blind 



THE boy's peril AND ESCAPE. 39 

push to do what was most contrary to his natural 
faculties, repulsive to his taste, and in which, with 
utmost stress and strain of effort, he could never hope 
to rise above mediocrity. . . . He became moody, 
restless, and irritable." * His father wisely set him to 
the reading of biographies, naval histories, lives of 
great sailors and commanders. Lord Nelson became 
his hero. He determined to go to sea, and his father 
learned of his plan. It was easy for Lyman Beecher 
to show him that, if he were to be a sailor, he did not 
wish to be a common sailor or even a midshipman. 
Henry confessed that he wanted ultimately to be a 
commodore, and that in order to be ready for such a 
possible fate he must study mathematics and naviga- 
tion. The shrewd and kindly father thus persuaded 
the restless boy that a preparation for college was 
needed, and Lyman Beecher earnestly believed that 
his son would yet enter the ministry. 

Thomas K. Beecher has given us interesting pictures 
of his brother Henry in his Boston life. He has told 
us what a hero this brother was to him. The boy 
who owned the long sled and coasted down Copp's 
Hill, and skated on the Mill Dam, and ran to fires, 
and could play on the flute, and who stormed off to 
the Latin School, and could jump and whirl round 
the horizontal bar, and was fearless of open stable- 
doors and red cows with monstrous horns, was much 
more of a hero to young Thomas than was the quiet 
and scholarly brother Edward. In Henry's Boston 
experience we read more of his fights with the 
boys and of the violent sports and pranks in which 



^ " Men of Our Times-," p. 517. 



40 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

he was supreme, than of any great successes in 
study. 

And yet it was a time of important mental and moral 
and physical changes. His boy nature was swelling out 
into something larger, and life was beginning to be 
something besides a dream and a joke. Questions 
of character, of duty, of service, and of occupation, 
were forced upon his fermenting and developing soul 
in this period of juvenile turbulence. The restless 
desire to run away to sea was a natural result in his 
case of his excitation and also of his moral tempta- 
tions, for he has left on record the confession that, 
had he remained much longer in Boston, he would 
have plunged into moral ruin. 

He was sent to Mount Pleasant Institute near 
Amherst to finish his preparation for admission to col- 
lege. This exchange of surroundings brought him once 
more into a rural and more congenial environment. 
The stage-coach which took him from Boston took 
him away from unsatisfactory and unhealthful con- 
ditions. Now in the country he is freer, and has 
something to live for which excites all his ambition. 
In the beginning he looked forward to a life of action, 
and this early taste for a military life reminds us of 
the similar early experience of the Rev. Frederick VV. 
Robertson, who divides with Henry Ward Beecher 
the fame of having most profoundly impressed the 
preaching of this century. In the Mount Pleasant 
Academy, with its semi-military methods, he came 
under the influence of excellent teachers who were 
thorough, but not too severe, and who appear to have 
been skillful in fashioning his mind. He went through 
a drill in elocution under Prof. John E. Lovell, 



THE BOY S PERIL AND ESCAPE. 4I 

of whom he said : "A better teacher in his department 
was never made." This early training was of vital 
importance to one destined to reach the highest fame 
as an orator. 

Under Fitzgerald, the teacher of mathematics, 
Henry Ward was intellectually converted. He 
was taught to conquer hard lessons. What 
most children learn somewhat earlier, young 
Beecher learned at a later period and learned it 
thoroughly. He was forced to defend his propositions 
or his solutions, and thus gained intellectual self- 
confidence and self-control. This drill in mathemat- 
ics, supplemented by his training in vocal inflections, 
postures and gestures was the beginning of mental 
enjoyment and aspiration. He was patient under the 
long elocutionary discipline to which he was subjected 
and, in later life, at Lane Theological Seminary, he 
continued the drill himself in company with his 
brother Charles. His fine dramatic power after 
awhile became evident. Lyman Abbott once said of 
him that " his face would have made him a fortune 
as an actor," and it is amusing to remember that, in 
the drama of William Tell, which was performed by 
the Mount Pleasant students, this champion of the 
lowly took the part of the tyrant Gessler. 

Beecher's love of flowers, which finally became such 
an ardent passion with him, began to show itself in 
Amherst and he was sometimes seen bent in silent 
adoration over pansy and aster beds, " feeding his 
hungry little soul witli the beauty of their forms and 
colors." School-life seems to have been to him, in this 
stage of his career what it is to most earnest, aspiring, 
and much-tempted boys. It is pleasant to learn that he 



42 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

came at last to enjoy his Latin fairly well, and to 
make some progress in his Greek. Like most earnest 
students he was immensely busy, and found it hard 
to get time for his daily devotions. It is said that he 
loved to pray better than to read the Scriptures. 

A revival came to the Mount Pleasant school, and, in 
some mysterious way, as it seemed to him, he was 
induced, as he then hoped, to give his heart to Christ 
the Lord. And, though his serious feelings had 
almost departed from him after a short time, he went 
home to Boston to join himself with the Hanover 
Street Church. His father had sent for him, and the 
boy, much agitated^ full of vague ideas and vague 
purposes, took upon him the vows of open discipleship. 
He was chilled and almost paralyzed by the committee 
who examined him as to his hope and his evidences; 
his heart was petrified when he heard his name called 
from the pulpit, and he was far from satisfied that he 
was doing right. He walked home crying, filled with 
inexplicable wishes and longings, not thinking that 
he was a true Christian, suffering from a mixture of 
pride and humility on account of his position. There 
was something in his nature which required a new 
revelation of truth. He needed to be touched by a 
great experience, in order that the many orbs of his 
wondrous being might swing into an abiding harm.ony. 
He was deeply moved by what had occurred and the 
change, whatever it was which had come to him, 
obliterated for ever his former purpose of entering on 
the life of a sailor. / 

It was with his mind turned toward the min- 
istry that he went back to Mount Pleasant 
and began the more careful study of the Bible, 



THE BOY S PERIL AND ESCAPE. 43 

especially of the Evangelists. He soon took 
up the Greek Testament, and he began to wonder 
whether it would hurt him to read the novels of 
Scott and Cooper. To one of his sisters he writes : 
" O I have such thoughts, such views of God and 
His love and mercy that my heart would burst through 
the corrupt body of this world and soar up with the 
angels." But this uplifted state of feeling was his 
while in meeting, or when reading some inspiring 
book. On the other hand, it is recorded that he was 
greatly provoked at times with the teacher who 
scolded and ridiculed him during recitation, and he 
believed that he would have been discouraged had 
he not had a Divine Friend on whom he could lay 
what seemed his great troubles. At Amherst he gave 
the first indication of interest in and of fondness for 
young women, and he became the enthusiastic friend 
of one of the schoolboys. They pledged to each 
other an everlasting fraternity ! Thus early did 
Henry Ward Beecher enter into that beautiful and 
perilous world of friendship wherein he was to enjoy 
so keenly and suffer so terribly. 



CHAPTER VI. 

AMHERST COLLEGE AND HER GREATEST SON. 

** The end of learning," wrote Milton, in his great 
" Tractate on Education," " is to repair the ruins of 
our first parents by regaining to know God aright, 
and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, 
to be like Him, as we may the nearest by possess- 
ing our souls of true virtue, which, being united to the 
Heavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest per- 
fection." School and college life did Henry Ward 
Beecher noble service along the lines which the great 
Puritan poet deemed the true path of learning, but 
his greatest schooling in divine knowledge came in a 
later and marvelous personal experience. 

In 1830, he was ready for Amherst College. He 
had made such excellent preparation that he was able 
to enter the Sophomore class, but, owing to the advice 
of his father, he decided to enter the Freshman class, 
which numbered forty members. He, who was to 
become the most famous graduate of that splendid 
New England college, was then seventeen years of 
age, and is described as a smooth-faced and bashful 
young man who so rapidly changed his appearance 
that sometimes his sisters hardly knew him. Dr. 
Heman Humphrey, father of famous and noble men, 
was then the President of Amherst College, which was 



AMHERST COl LEGE AND HER GREATEST SON. 45 

at that time nine years old. He had studied theology, 
like Lyman Beecher, under President Dwight, and, 
like Dr. Beecher, was an earnest apostle of temper- 
ance. *' He, more than any one else, was instrumental 
in giving the college its character. Under his admin- 
istration the purpose of its founders was realized. 
They desired it to be a training-school for the Church, 
a seminary for the education, especially of ministers 
and missionaries of the Cross." ^ 

Henry Ward Beecher could never have achieved the 
influence and fame which came to him without such 
training as was given by these years at Amherst. 
Having acquired by Latin and mathematics the power 
of prolonged and systematic study, he was ready to 
pursue those investigations which he most liked. It 
was not his ambition or choice to lead his class as the 
best scholar, though Lewis Tappan, a classmate, writes: 
" In logic and class debates no one could approach 
him." " I listened to his flow of impassioned eloquence 
in those, my youthful days, with wonder and admira- 
tion." ^ Beecher says of himself, " I knew how to study 
and I turned it into things I wanted to know." The 
tastes of this remarkable man, whom Matthew Arnold 
once styled a.'' heated barbarian," did not lead him to 
the repeated study of the Greek and Latin classical 
authors so dear to the mind of this semi-pagan critic 
and poet, but rather to the great English classics 
whose enthusiasm and eloquence fired his imagination. 

Beecher made no mean figure in college life. His 
classmate. Dr. Field, savs of him: "I never knew 



^ " Memorial Sketches of Hemanand Sophia Humphrey," p. 203. 
^ " Biography," p. 115. 



46 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

anything of him but what was good and great and 
orderly and becoming a Christian." " He was a strong 
temperance man, and was very bold to rebuke his fellow 
students in anything he thought to be wrong." ^ In the 
college prayer-meetings he learned to speak with 
fluency and with fervid eloquence. His written essays 
were the admiration of the college on account of their 
originality and freshness One of his productions had 
for its theme the superiority of Pollock over Milton as 
a poet, a crude literary heresy of which he was 
undoubtedly soon cured. " He had always something 
to say that was fresh and striking and out of the 
beaten track of thought, something, too, that he had 
not gotten from books, but that was the product of his 
own thinking." ^ His general knowledge was unusu- 
ally wide and his classmates remember with admira- 
tion his earnest and fiery speech, and recall with 
delight his general cheerfulness and his remarkable 
power of making others happy. His stories and 
repartees were as w^ell known in the college then as 
they have since become within the bounds of civiliza- 
tion. Some of his practical jokes became famous, 
especially that one where he provided an exceedingly 
low chair for the very long-legged tutor in mathe- 
matics who came to his room for the purpose of 
exhorting him on account of some petty misdemeanor. 
In his sermon on the death of Wendell Phillips, 
Beecher said : " Fifty years ago, during my college 
life, I was chosen by the Athenian Society to debate 
the question of African Colonization, which was then 
new, fresh, and enthusiastic. Fortunately I was as- 



* '• Biography," p. 115. ^ " Biography," p. 113. 



AMHERST COLLEGE AND HER GREATEST SON. 47 

signed to the negative side of the question, and in 
preparing the speech, I prepared for my whole life. 
I contended against colonization as a condition of 
emancipation ; enforced colonization was but little 
better than enforced slavery, and advocated immedi- 
ate emancipation on the broad ground of human 
rights. I knew but very little then, but I knew this, 
that all men are designed of God to be free, a fact 
which ought to be the text of every man's life — this 
sacredness of humanity as given of God; redeemed 
from animalism by Jesus Christ, crowned and clothed 
with rights that no law nor oppression should dare 
touch." Thus he gave early signs of the coming 
reformer in that field where he was to achieve his 
grandest renown. And, unlike Wendell Phillips, who 
succeeded in preventing the formation of a temper- 
ance society in Harvard College, Henry Ward Beecher 
was an earnest temperance advocate during his col- 
lege-days. 

Old Dr. Beecher, like many other New England 
ministers with large families, most of them hungry 
for an education, was exceedingly straitened for 
money during the time that Henry was at Amherst. 
He scarcely knew by what means he could keep his 
sons at study, for Charles at this time was in Bowdoin. 
He had an anxious conference with his wife, and the 
wife lay awake all night and cried about it. Dr. 
Beecher said : " The Lord has always taken care of 
me and I am sure He will." The next morning the 
door-bell was rung, and a letter containing a hundred 
dollar bill was handed in, the thank-offering of a 
parishioner for the conversion of one of his children. 
Meanwhile Henry, pursuing his independent studies 



48 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

at Amherst, became anxious to do something. He 
began work as a tract-distributor or Bible agent, 
established a daily prayer-meeting and prayed earn- 
estly for a revival. But when the revival came, he 
entered into darkness, had no real joy, and, even 
doubting his conversion, went to good Dr. Hum- 
phrey in his wretchedness and told the President he 
wanted to be a Christian. He went away, however, 
in deeper darkness.^ Professor Hitchcock, to whom 
he then applied, was unable to help him. Then the 
moody, earnest young man resorted to prayer. He 
says he frequently prayed all night, or would have 
done so if he hadn't gone to sleep. He found relief 
in the thought of God's faithfulness to those who put 
their trust in Him. All things became bright for 
awhile, and he wisely endeavored to help others in 
their spiritual unrest and distress. Yet the old 
moodiness returned. He had a reaction, and entered 
again into darkness and hopelessness. His chief help 
he found in the companionship of one Harrington, 
whom he long remembered with affectionate grati- 
tude. 



^ Referring to this in his "Yale Lectures on Preaching," he says: 
I recollect going down to Dr. Humphrey's in a state of prodigious 
mental excitement on my own behalf, and asking for some instruc- 
tion that I might ease myself of my burden and be brought to a 
saving knowledge of Christ; and he said to me: "My young friend, 
you are manifestly under the strivings of God's Spirit, and I dare 
not touch the Ark with profane hand. The Spirit of God when He 
strives with a man, is His own best interpreter." And so he left 
me to the work of the Spirit, whereas, if I had had but a very 
little clear instruction, it would have saved me years of anxiety, 
and at limes, positive anguish, for want of knowledge. — "Yale 
Lectures on Preaching," Vol. IL, pp. 241-242. 



AMHERST COLLEGE AND HER GREATEST SON. 49 

In his Sophomore year, 1831, he became engaged 
to Miss Eunice White BuUard, whom he afterwards 
married and who survives him. She was born in 
West Sutton, Massachusetts, August 6, 181 2, and 
thus was ten months his senior. She was educated 
at Hadley. Mrs. Beecher writes : " My first meeting 
with Henry Ward Beecher was in the early part of 
May, 1830. He was a classmate of a brother of mine 
at Amherst College. The two were just out of their 
Freshman year when, together with another college 
classmate, they walked from Amherst to my father's 
house at West Sutton for their spring vacation. At 
that time young Beecher was not quite seventeen 
years old, and so young and boyish was his appear- 
ance that no one would have thought him more than 
fifteen." ' 

Beecher brought great life to the West Sutton 
household, and his winning gentleness and irrepress- 
ible fun were particularly enjoyed. Miss Bullard's 
father said of him : " Well, he is smart ! He'll make 
his mark in the world if he lives.^' And her mother 
often said of him : " Henry always brings sunshine 
and makes me feel young." Mrs. Beecher records 
that " as a young man he was unusually free from any 
bad habits. He never smoked nor used tobacco in 
any form either as a boy, youth, or full-grown young 
man. He never indulged in a drop of liquor. His 
language was as pure when among his companions 
as when in the parlor. He rejected all indulgences. 
As a young man he never played cards ; indeed, he 



^ " Mr. Beecher as I Knew Him," Ladies' Home Jourual^ 
October, 1891. 

4 



50 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

never knew one card from another. He avoided all 
these habits in his later years, although he had no 
prejudice against the playing of cards by others, if 
played for amusement and at home. After coming 
to Brooklyn, we both learned to play backgammon. 
It was a quiet game and he said it helped him to a 
good night's rest if his labors during the day had 
excited him so much as to retard his usually sound 
sleep." ^ 

When Mr. Beecher's engagement was announced 
to the parents the father was angry and the 
mother greatly grieved. " Why you are a couple 
of babies," he said, *' you don't know your own 
minds and you wont for some years to come." 
Mrs. Beecher adds, ^' but fifty-seven years have 
given ample proof that we did." Henry's wonder- 
fully earnest appeal overcame at last all the oppo- 
sition in the heart of the strong, proud man who 
doubted the strength of that affection which was 
destined to endure so long. Mrs. Beecher records 
that Henry at this time was an exceedingly homely 
young man, and a portrait of him at seventeen, the 
first portrait ever taken of one who has been portrayed 
in hundreds of aspects, is certainly the least engag- 
ing of all his pictures. 

But it is not needful to elaborate the details which 
have come down to us of Beecher's college years. 
Always active in learning or doing; teaching a school 
in the village of West Sutton, giving temperance 
lectures, for one of which he received a fee of five 



^ " Mr. Beeclier as I Knew Him," Ladies' Home Journal^ 
October, 1891. 



AMHERST COLLEGE AND HER GREATEST SON. 5 1 

dollars from which he made a present of Baxter's 
"Saints' Rest " to his beloved; walking, during a 
college vacation, to Brattleboro, Vermont, and re- 
ceiving ten dollars for the address he gave there, 
and with this large sum buying Miss Bullard's en- 
gagement-ring which was also her wedding-ring ; 
preaching his first sermon in Northbridge, Massa- 
chusetts, where he taught school in 1831 and 1833 > 
teaching school in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, where 
he carried on a revival meeting in the evenings; begin- 
ning the study of phrenology in his Sophomore year, 
a study which he was destined to continue through 
life; beginning the collection of a library out of his 
small money allowances and small earnings; writing 
his first article, printed in the college paper, on the 
scenery which had excited his imagination in one of 
his lecture tramps; rejoicing in being able to add to 
his library a splendid copy of the works of Edmund 
Burke, the study of which added strength and splendor 
to his style; forsaking all wasteful expenditures that 
he might increase his stock of books; reading largely 
and widely from the old English writers, — such is a 
partial record of those eager preparatory days at 
Amherst. 

One poem of Samuel Daniel, who was the laureate 
of Queen Elizabeth until Ben Jonson super- 
seded him, so greatly fascinated Beecher in his 
youth that he was accustomed to read it over and 
over. It was composed of lines addressed by Daniel 
to the Earl of Southampton, and Mr. Beecher says 
they were about the only piece of poetry he ever 
committed to memory. As a good deal in Mr. 
Beecher's future trial, struggle, and character is sug- 



52 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

gested in these strong lines, they are worth read- 
ing. 

"He who hath never warred with misery, 
Nor ever tugged with fortune in distress, 
Hath no occasion and no field to try 
The strength and forces of his worthiness. 
Those parts of judgment which felicity 
Keeps as concealed, affliction must express, 
And only men show their abilities 
And what they are, in their extremities." 

"Mutius the fire, the tortures Regulus, 
Did make the miracles of faith and zeal ; 
Exile renowned and graced Rutilius, 
Imprisonment and poison did reveal 
The worth of Socrates, Fabricius, 
Poverty did grace that common weal 
More than all Sylla's riches got with strife, 
And Cato's death did vie with Caesar's life." 

" Such an enthusiasm," said Mrs. Stowe, " shows 
clearly on what a key the young man had set his life- 
purposes and what he was looking for in his life-bat- 
tle."* Another poem had a great fascination for 
him. It was Daniel's address to Lady Margaret, 
Countess of Cumberland, one specimen of which is 
the following: 

"He that of such a height hath built his mind, 
And reared the dwelling ot his thought so strong 
As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame 
Of his resolved powers ; nor all the wind 



' " Men of our Times," p. 528. 



AMHERST COLLEGE AND HER GREATEST SON. 53 

Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong 
His settled peace, or to disturb the same ; 
Wliat a fair seat hath he ! From whence he may 
The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey." 

" It has had a good long swing," said Beecher, " and 
it will go rolling down a great many years yet." 
Nothing could have been more fortunate than his 
early enthusiastic study of the English classic poets. 

The poets are the best teachers of language and no 
nation was ever favored by a group of singers equal 
to those who clustered around London in the days of 
Elizabeth, James, and the first Charles. The reading 
of Spenser, Shakespeare, Daniel, and Milton by a mind 
of his temperament, with his work to do in the world, 
was one of the chief events in his intellectual develop- 
ment. He may not have deemed it so important as 
his study of phrenology, but it was vastly more neces- 
sary to the life which Providence had marked out for 
him. While in college he read the works of Combe, 
Gall, and Spurzheim, formed a Phrenological Club, 
and lectured on phrenology, that empirical system- 
whose principles or speculations are very old and 
which has of recent days captivated even such men 
as Sir George McKenzie, Archbishop Whateley, and 
Geoffrey St. Hilare. This early enthusiasm for 
phrenology was in some respects a piece of good for- 
tune. It led him into physiological and scientific 
studies and these continued through life. He made 
more use of his physiological knowledge in his subse- 
quent preaching than he did of the Scotch metaphysics 
which he grappled with while in college. However 
questionable phrenology may be as a science, it was 
an exceeding great help to Beecher in describing 



54 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

human nature. It aided him to appreciate the com- 
plexity of the human mind and the variety of motives 
by which human life is actuated. The faculties, it is 
said, became to him like persons, and though he 
never preached phrenology as a science, he always 
used its terms, finding the classification helpful. He 
wanted to be judged, in his later theological state- 
ments, by this philosophy which he early adopted for 
popular use. He believed that misunderstandings 
would thus be avoided, and he was confident that, 
through his scientific and philosophical views, he had 
reached a deeper, more reasonable, and abiding faith 
in the Word of God. 

During the last two years of his college life 
he was in earnest sympathy with his father in 
his great battle against Unitarianism in Boston, 
and he became familiar with all the distinctions 
in the theological quarrel in New England. But the 
lives of both father and son were to be transplanted 
to a fresher field which proved also to be a field of 
battle. They had been conservatives in the East. 
They were to contend with ultra-theological conserva- 
tism in the West. 



CHAPTER VII. 

IN THE GREAT VALLEY OF DECISION. 

Lane Theological Seminary, or " Kemper-Lane," 
as it might well have been named, on Walnut Hills, 
near Cincinnati, had been established by earnest and 
far-seeing Christian men, for the purpose of training 
preachers for the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, into 
which the tides of population were rapidly pouring. 
" Kemper gave the land, and Lane the money." ^ It 
was then thought that Cincinnati was to be the 
central and controlling city of the mighty West. Dr. 
Lyman Beecher was deemed the best man in the 
country to become the head of this school of the 
prophets. He entered with energy and evangelical 
enthusiasm on this important work, which alone 
seemed to him to surpass the commanding influence 
of his New England pulpit. Drawing to him a fine 
class of Christian young men, he instructed and 
fired them with his own devout enthusiasm. 

Cincinnati was at that time a community where the 
tides of life from East and West, North and South 
seemed to flow together. ** An immense commerce was 
carried on from its wharves; it was the point where 
gathered the multitudes that were going out to 



^ " Sixtieth Anniversary of Lane Theological Seminary," p. 5. 



56 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

occupy the new territory; it was still the rendezvous 
of frontiersmen; more than this, it lay upon the bor- 
derland between the Free and Slave States, and 
already felt the uneasiness and bitterness of the irre- 
pressible conflict. Chain-gangs of slaves were con- 
tinually passing on the docks to the steamboats to be 
sold down South, and fugitives from bondage were 
keeping the sympathy or the hatred of the people 
in continual activity." ^ 

Into this great valley of decision, into the earnest 
and various life of the Seminary and of the large 
Beecher household, Henry Ward now entered, having 
completed, in 1834, his course at Amherst College. 
Lane Seminary, " a brick building in the woods of 
Ohio," where the students could hear the '' whistle of 
the quail, the scolding squirrels, . . . the soft 
thump and pat of the rabbit, and the breezy rush of 
the wild pigeons," furnished such a blending of the 
attractions of Nature and learning that it seems like 
an ideal place for such a mind as young Beecher's, 
It was a place of freedom and of zealous work. The 
forest which lay between the Seminary and Lyman 
Beecher's house was made *' to ring with vocal prac- 
tice and musical scales in imitation of band music " 
by Lyman Beecher's stentorian sons, Henry and 
Charles. It was fortunate for the future pastor 
of Plymouth Church that he then came under the 
wise instruction of Prof. Calvin E. Stowe, who 
was soon to be married to his sister Harriet. For 
Professor Stowe he entertained, through life, the 
warmest friendship, and by him he was led into a 



^ '• Biography," p. 153. 



IN THE GREAT VALLEY OF DECISION. 57 

thorough Study and analysis of the Bible, " not as the 
parts of a machine, but as a body of truth instinct 
with God, warm with all divine and human sympa- 
thies, clothed with language adapted to their best 
expression, and to be understood as similar language 
used for similar ends in every-day life."^ Mr. 
Beecher's claim to be a Biblical preacher, though 
frequently and, perhaps, generally denied, must 
be vindicated, if at all, by his frequent use and 
explanation of large tracts of Scripture. In his 
reading from the New Testament, particularly, 
he was wont to comment with singular freshness of 
thought and expression on the passages he had read, 
especially when they were found in Paul's Epistles. 
And, though it must be confessed that the great 
Apostle would have sometimes failed to recog- 
nize his own ideas after they had passed through the 
mind of the poet-philosopher, still it must be said 
that Mr. Beecher often penetrated with his clear 
analysis, and his thorough understanding of the 
differences of the Hellenistic from the American 
mind, into the very heart of the Apostle's meanings. 

Dr. Beecher lived in a brick house which Henry 
with his own hand painted a sort of a cream color. 
From the amount of life going on within the house, 
we should say to-day that it might well have been 
painted a fiery red! The president of Lane Seminary 
was also the pastor of the Second Presbyterian 
Church where Henry taught a Bible-class of young 
ladies, making the most careful preparation for his 
work. The life into which Beecher now entered was 



1 " Biography," p. 137. 



58 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

a constant high tide of intellectual and moral excite- 
ment. Forty students had left Lane Seminary for 
Oberlin on account of the conservative position which 
they felt that Dr. Beecher had taken in regard to the 
the slavery discussion "Of the several gloomy 
years that succeeded the Abolition secession, I 
need only say that the wonder is that Lane 
did not perish. It had few students and little 
money." ^ But the enthusiasm in the Beecher house- 
hold was not dependent on crowds of students. 

The late Professor Evans, of Lane, described Dr. 
Beecher as " alert, fertile, self-forgetful, magnetic, 
full of electric fire, flashing with quaint originality, 
logical though not systematic, soaring spontaneously 
to the heights of eloquence, kindling into enthusi- 
asm at every glimpse of millennial glory." ^ Such 
a man was a theological university in himself. The 
life of the Beecher household " was a kind of moral 
Heaven," with the young men, Henry and Charles, 
singing the "Creation" and the "Messiah," discus- 
sing natural and moral inability, reading Sir AValter 
Scott, writing out notes of the lectures on Church 
history and finding life thoroughly worth living. 
Henry lectured on temperance and phrenology, and 
went with his father to the meetings of the Presby- 
tery which were sometimes stormy with debate. The 
Beecher family were not rich; indeed they were in 
straightened circumstances. Lyman Beecher was 
described as a man "before his age in his views and 
always before his salary in his expenses." But was 



^ Dr. Joseph F. Tuttle, " Souvenir of the Sixtieth Anniversary 
of the History of Lane Theological Seminary," p. 42. 
'^ " Lane Souvenir," pp. 24-25. 



IN THE GREAT VALLEY OF DECISION. 59 

there ever a household richer in intellectual and 
moral life ? 

While pursuing his theological studies Henry Ward 
became editor, for a time, of the Cincinnati Journal^ 
and was aided in this by his sister, Mrs. Harriet Beecher 
Stowe, and when the pro-slavery riots broke out in 
1836, he was sworn in as special constable to protect 
the negroes and their friends who were in great peril 
of their lives. " For a day or two, we did not know 
but there would be actually war to the knife, as was 
threatened by the mob, and we really saw Henry de- 
part with his pistols, with daily alarm ; only we were all 
too full of patriotism not to have sent every brother we 
had, rather than not have had the principles of free- 
dom and order defended. But here the tide turned. 
The mob, unsupported by a now frightened commu- 
nity, slunk into their dens and were still." ^ 

Among the glimpses given us of Mr. Beecher at Lane 
is one which he has furnished in regard to an early ser- 
mon for which he had no paternal pride. " My brother 
George wished to be away a Sunday, and I was request- 
ed to supply his pulpit. Text, sermon, and all attendant 
circumstances are gone from my memory, except the 
greenness^ no doubt of that."^ Another interesting 
event was the family reunion, a meeting of the eleven 
Beecher children for the first time, a meeting which 
filled Dr. Beecher with transports of joy. " There were 
more tears than words. The Doctor attempted to 
pray, but could scarcely speak. His full heart poured 
itself out in a flood of weeping. He could not go 



^ •' The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe," p. 86. 
^ "Anecdotes of Henry Ward Beecher," p. 48. 



6o HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

on; Edward continued, each one in his turn uttered 
some sentence of thanksgiving. They then began at 
the head and related their fortunes. After special 
prayer all joined hands and sang ' Old Hundred ' in 
these words: 

* From all that dwell below the skies 
Let the Creator's praise arise.' " ' 

It must also be mentioned that at the close of 
Henry's first year in the seminary there occurred the 
death of Mrs. Beecher, of whom her son writes " that 
God was with her in her closing days, and that the 
light of His countenance cheered her pathway to the 
tomb." 

Parts of an old journal kept by Henry while at 
Lane Seminary have been preserved. In this we find 
his meditations, many of them quite characteristic, on 
his own spiritual life, analyses of Scott, Shakespeare, 
Coleridge, Byron, and Burns; references to his Bible- 
class which absorbed much of his thought, and affec- 
tionate references to Eunice Bullard with whom he 
kept up a faithful correspondence, most of which has 
unhappily been destroyed. But some of the strongest 
influences that were to shape his future life came 
from the theological controversy in which his father 
was violently assailed. From that long and exceed- 
ingly bitter strife between " the forces of the Scotch- 
Irish, Presbyterian, Calvinistic fatalism," and " the 
advancing rationalism of New England New School 
theology," it was natural that Henry Ward Beecher 
should come out with the strongest antipathy to 



1 •« 



Biography," p. 143. 



IN THE GREAT VALLEY OF DECISION. 6l 

every form of heresy-hunting and to most forms of 
theological contention. Dr. Wilson, who was the 
leader of the attacking party, is described as a man 
who "in many points marvelously resembled General 
Jackson, both in person and in character, and he 
fought the battle with the same gallant, headlong 
vigor and sincere, unflinching constancy. His habits 
of thought were those of a Western pioneer, accus- 
tomed from childhood to battle with Indians and 
wild beasts in the frontier life of an early State. His 
views of mental philosophy, and of the modes of 
influencing the human mind, were like those of the 
Emperor Constantine when he commanded a whole 
Synod of Bishops to think alike without a day's 
delay, or those of the Duke of Wellington when he 
told the doubting inquirers at Oxford that the thing 
to be done was to sign the Thirty-nine Articles and 
believe them." ^ 

Henry Ward Beecher learned that, however earnest, 
unselfish, and consecrated the life of a Christian min- 
ister like his father might be, he was not safe from 
persecution, unless he conformed to the literal teach- 
ings of what he deemed an irrational, misleading, 
and obsolescent theology. Good men, fired with a 
mistaken zeal for the Lord, shooting their arrows at 
Christian brethren, filled him with a lifelong disgust. 
His immense activity in those times of his father's 
theological trouble was not given to assailing others, 
but was expended, with filial piety, in defense of 
Dr. Beecher. "What racing and chasing along muddy 
Western roads, to obscure towns, each party hoping 



' " Men of Our Times," p. 534, 



62 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

that the length of the way and the depth of the mud 
would discourage their opponents, keep them away 
and so give their own side the majority! Dr. Beecher 
and his sons, it was soon found, could race and 
chase and ride like born Kentuckians, and that free 
agency on horseback would go through mud and fire 
and water as gallantly as ever natural inability could. 
There was something grimly ludicrous in the dismay 
with which Dr. Wilson, inured from his boyhood to 
bear-fights, and to days and nights spent in cane- 
brakes and dens of wolves, found, on his stopping at 
an obscure log hut in the depth of the wilderness, 
Dr. Beecher, witli his sons and his New School dele- 
gates, ahead of him on their way to Synod." ^ 

When we think of Henry Ward Beecher with 
his father, "scurrying through the country, not 
to rescue souls from danger nor to forward any 
great moral end, but to anticipate the action of 
some Presbytery or to arrange for some meet- 
ing of Synod," when we think of Lyman Beecher 
compelled to leave his wife's death-bed to repel the 
attacks of heresy-hunters, we find in all this an 
important key to Henry Ward Beecher's later attitude 
towards churches and divisive theological creeds. 
But, as was afterwards truly said of Henry Ward 
Beecher, Dr. Lyman Beecher " had enemies, but no 
enmities." He had no personal bitterness against 
Dr. Wilson. At the Sixtieth Anniversary of Lane 
Theological Seminary, Rev. John W. Bishop, who 
knew him well, remarked: "What dear Prof. Z. M. 
Humphrey said of another was most true of Dr. 



• " Men of Our Times," p. 535. 



IN THE GREAT VALLEY OF DECISION. 63 

Beecher. No one, we believe, ever more devoutly- 
wished to think of his conflicts as impersonal, the 
conflict of opinion rather than of men. In the later 
and serener periods of his life, he remembered them, 
rather as the mariner on shore remembers the tossings 
of a storm, the winds and waves with which he 
wrestled, not the ^olus who unloosed the former or 
the Neptune who disturbed the latter."^ 

The three years at Lane Seminary were a time of 
intellectual broadening, earnest spiritual activity, and 
deep soul unrest. His letters to Miss Bullard show 
that he was much troubled with doubts. He had no 
idea that these doubts were *' devil-born." He man- 
fully faced " the specters of the mind," but as he 
looked out into the future, his prospects seemed 
uncertain. He was far from sure of finding a home 
in the Presbyterian ministry, and, in the event of not 
being licensed, he dreamed and thought of going 
away into the far West, building a log hut in the 
wilderness, hunting up the scattered settlers, and 
preaching to them the Gospel. " I will preach if it 
is in the byways and hedges." '' I must preach the 
Gospel as it is revealed to me.'"^ 

There came a time when his mind was carried 
over into a miserable, wholesale skepticism, and for 
the greater part of two years, he refused to stir one 
step until he saw something sure under his feet. And 
then came that manifestation of God which was 
Beecher's second conversion. In all the records of 
Christian history there have been few spiritual expe- 



^ Presbylerian Quarterly, July 1871. 
2 " Biography," p. 154. 



64 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

riences more momentous. We think of Saul at the 
gate of Damascus, of Augustine at Milan, of Luther 
in the Erfurt Monastery, of John Bunyan's escape 
from the burden of sin at Bedford, of John Wesley's 
spiritual enfranchisement after his conference with 
Peter Bohler, the young Moravian missionary, of 
Charles G. Finney's almost miraculous vision of 
Christ in his lawyer's office in the New York village. 
The preaching for fifty years of the most influential 
man who ever stood in an American pulpit received 
its tone and mighty energy from that golden and 
transcendent hour. It is always best described in his 
own glowing words : " I was a child of teaching and 
prayer; I was reared in the household of faith. . . , 
And yet, till after I was twenty-one years old, I 
groped without the knowledge of God in Christ 
Jesus. I know not what the tablets of eternity have 
written down, but I think that when I stand in Zion 
and before God, the brightest thing which I shall 
look back upon will be that blessed morning in May 
when it pleased God to reveal to my wandering soul 
the idea that it was His nature to love a man in his 
sins for the sake of helping him out of them ; that 
He did not do it out of compliment to Christ, or to a 
law or plan of salvation, but from the fulness of His 
great heart ; that He was a Being not made mad by 
sin, but sorry ; that He was not furious with w^rath 
toward the sinner, but pitied him — in short, that He 
felt toward me as my mother felt toward me, to 
whose eyes my wrong-doing brought tears, who 
never pressed me so close to her as when I had done 
wrong, and who would fain, with her yearning love, 
lift me out of trouble." 



IN THE GREAT VALLEY OF DECISION. 65 

And what follows reminds us of the famous 
confession by Jonathan Edwards of the trans- 
formation which came to the visible world after 
his conversion, when he saw " a calm, sweet cast 
or appearance of divine glory in almost every- 
thing," " in the sun, and moon, and stars ; in the 
clouds and blue sky, in the grass, flowers, trees, in 
the water, and all Nature which used greatly to fix 
my mind." Mr. Beecher said : " I shall never forget 
the feelings with which I walked forth that May 
morning. The golden pavements will never feel to 
my feet as then the grass felt to them ; and the sing- 
ing of the birds in the woods — for I roamed in the 
woods — was cacophonous to the sweet music of my 
thoughts ; and there were no forms in the universe 
v/hich seemed to me graceful enough to represent the 
Being, a conception of whose character had just 
dawned upon my mind. I felt when I had with the 
Psalmist called upon the heavens, the earth, the 
mountains, the streams, the floods, the birds, the 
beasts, and universal being, to praise God, that I had 
called upon nothing that could praise Him enough 
for the revelation of such a nature as that in the 
Lord Jesus Christ. Time went on, and next came 
the disclosure of the Christ ever present with me — a 
Christ that never was far from me, but was always 
near me, as a companion and friend to uphold and 
sustain me. This was the last and best revelation of 
God's Spirit to my soul. It is what I consider to be 
the culminating work of God's grace in man ; and no 
man is a Christian until he has experienced it. I do 
not mean that a man cannot be a good man until 
then ; but he has not got to Jerusalem till the gate 

5 



66 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

has been opened to him, and he has seen the King 
sitting in His glory with love to him individually." ^ 
This great experience, which shaped his whole life 
and teaching, was given him in Lane Seminary after 
the period of unrest and doubt into which he had 
plunged. He describes the change which trans- 
figured his life in these other words: " It then pleased 
God to lift upon me such a view of Christ, as one 
whose nature and office it is to have infinite and 
exquisite pity upon the w^eakness and want of sin- 
ners, as I had never had before. I saw that He had 
compassion upon them because they were sinners, 
and because He wanted to help them out of their 
sins It came to me like the bursting forth of spring. 
It was as if yesterday there was not a bird to be seen 
or heard, and as if to-day the woods were full of sing- 
ing birds. There rose up before me a view of Jesus 
as the Saviour of sinners — not of saints, but of sinners 
unconverted, before they were any better — because 
they were so bad and needed so much; and that view 
has never gone from me. It did not at first fill the 
whole Heaven; it came as a rift along the horizon; 
gradually, little by little, the cloud rolled up. It was 
three years before the whole sky was cleared so that 
I could see all around, but from that hour I felt that 
God had a father's heart; that Christ loved me in my 
sin; that while I was a sinner He did not frown upon 
me nor cast me off, but cared forme with unutterable 
tenderness, and would help me out of sin; and it 
seemed to me that I had everything I needed. When 
that vision was vouchsafed to me I felt that there 



1 (( 



Life of Beecher," pp. 35, 36, 37. 



IN THE GREAT VALLEY OF DECISION. 6^ 

was no more for me to do but to love, trust, and 
adore; nor has there ever been in my mind a doubt 
since that I did love, trust, and adore. There has 
been an imperfect comprehension, there have been 
grievous sins, there have been long defections; but 
never for a single moment have I doubted the power 
of Christ's love to save me, any more than I have 
doubted the existence in the heavens of the sun by 
day and the moon by night." 

Whatever may be thought of the theology suggested 
by some parts of these personal recitals of a great 
experience, there can be no doubt of the genuineness 
and transcendent importance of that intellectual and 
emotional change which had been wrought in him. He 
was being girded for a great mission; he was being 
equipped for a lifelong battle and for strange coming 
experiences of sorrow and trial. He was not fitted to 
wield the weapons of his father, but no man of his day 
was more eager and bold to attack evil and strengthen 
the Kingdom of righteousness. As Mrs. Stowe has 
written: " Like the shepherd boy of old he saw the 
giant of sin stalking through the world, defying the 
armies of the living God, and longed to attack him, 
but the armor in which he had been equipped for the 
battle was no help, but only an incumbrance." ^ But his 
experience changed all this. " To present Jesus Christ 
personally as the Friend and Helper of humanity, 
Christ as God impersonate, eternally and by the neces- 
sity of His nature helpful and remedial and restorative; 
the Friend of each individual soul, and thus the friend 
of all society; this was the one thing which his soul 



Men of our Times," p. 5390 



68 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

rested on as a worthy object in entering the ministry. 
He afterwards said in speaking of his feelings at this 
time: * I was like the man in the story to whom a 
fairy gave a purse with a single piece of money in it, 
which he found always came again as soon as he had 
spent it. I thought I knew at last one thing to 
preach, I found it included everything.' " 



CHAPTER VIII. 



TESTING HIS WEAPONS. 



The years of preparation with all their strange and 
varied experiences are now ended, and the Christian 
soldier is ready to enter the field of strife. There is 
no gleam of romance that lights up that field. Few 
preachers of the Gospel have known from the outset 
equal hardships. At the junction of the Ohio and 
Miami rivers is the town of Lawrenceburg, Indiana, 
which, in 1837, had fifteen hundred inhabitants and 
four gigantic distilleries. And Mr. Beecher, having 
been graduated from Lane Theological Seminary and 
licensed by the Cincinnati Presbytery, after the usual 
examination and the reading of his trial lecture, was 
led, by the invitation of an earnest Christian Yankee 
woman, to go to Lawrenceburg, and, in that unattrac- 
tive field, where the Presbyterian Church of twenty 
members consisted of nineteen women and one good- 
for-nothing man, to preach his trial sermon. It was 
in June, 1837, that he received a unanimous call to 
the pastorate of this church, at a salary of two hundred 
and fifty dollars. The event was a momentous one 
in this great life, and the thoughtful Christian stu- 
dent finds it an event of deep interest and wide sig- 
nificance in the history of modern thought and 
modern evangelism, when this young man of twenty- 



7© HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

four began to test those weapons of love, which he 
had gathered from the arsenal of the Holy Spirit, and 
the shining armor with which he had girded himself 
for the battle of the Lord. 

The year 1837 marks a really remote epoch in the 
annals of America. The great men of that time were 
Jackson, Clay, Webster, and Calhoun. Abraham Lin- 
coln had served a single term in the Illinois Legislature, 
but was unknown to fame. The United States was 
then a small nation with a big heart and an unusually 
big head. At the Presidential election of the previous 
year the whole vote of the country was only a million 
and a half, a vote surpassed in 1892 by the combined 
suffrages of two States of the Union. A great tide 
of Western immigration was pouring in. Arkansas 
was admitted as a State in 1836 and Michigan in 1837. 
But the present metropolis of the Northwest was then 
a mud-hole at the foot of Lake Michigan, and her 
first census, taken that year, showed a population of 
4,170. The New World's commercial capital. New 
York, was then the residence of less than three hun- 
dred thousand people. 

American literature was scarcely born in 1837. The 
anti-slavery agitation had been launched by William 
Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips had enlisted in 
the battle for the slave. The most prominent event of 
that year was the financial panic. Before Van Buren 
had been two months in the chair of Jackson the mer- 
cantile failures in New York alone amounted to a hun- 
dred millions of dollars. During the year 1837 occurred 
the division of the Presbyterian Church into the Old 
and New School Assemblies. While Henry Ward 
Beecher was still an obscure young man, though bear- 



TESTING HIS WEAPONS. 7I 

ing a great name, making pastoral visits amid shanties 
and shops in a rough Hoosier river town, the theo- 
logical celebrities of the country were shining and 
numerous. Among them were Dr. Archibald Alexan- 
der, who was then teaching theology at Priceton, as he 
had been for twenty-five years; Dr. Eliphalet Nott, 
President of Union College; Dr. John McDowell, of the 
Central Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia; Dr. 
Gardner Spring, of the Brick Church, New York; Dr. 
George Duffield, who that year was leaving New 
York for Detroit where he became the beloved 
patriarch of the Presbyterian Church in Michigan; 
the famous Albert Barnes, of the First Presbyterian 
Church, Philadelphia, whom the General Assembly, 
the previous year, had acquitted of the charge of 
heresy, the heresy supposed to be lodged in his Com- 
mentary on the Epistle to the Romans and his Ser- 
mon on the Way of Salvation. How the weeds of 
oblivion and indifference have overgrown the battle- 
ments on which fought the theologians of 1836 1 

Dr. Nathaniel Emmons, in 1837, had yet three years 
to live. Dr. Charles Hodge was Professor of Oriental 
and Biblical Literature in Princeton. Dr. Edward 
Robinson was that year called to the professorship 
of Biblical Literature in the one-year-old Union 
Theological Seminary in New York, and had not yet 
achieved his fame. ' Henry B. Smith was pursuing 
his theological studies at Bangor; Professor Phelps 
had that year been graduated from the University 
of Pennsylvania; Dr. Mark Hopkins had just entered 
on the Presidency of Williams College; Professor 
Park was teaching Sacred Rhetoric at Andover; Dr. 
Robert W. Patterson, who for many years has been 



72 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

" the unmitred pope of the Presbyterian denomina- 
tion in the Northwest," was then a student at Lane 
Seminary, and Dr. Richard S. Storrs had two years 
of study yet to complete in Amherst College Dr. 
Talmage was then a boy of five and Spurgeon was a 
child of three and Phillips Brooks was not yet two. 

Mr. Beecher's little parish in Lawrenceburg had 
none of the exquisite charms of that New England 
village life which he has pictured so delightfully in 
" Norwood," Like other Western towns of that time, it 
was an extemporized, rough, and unadorned collection 
of temporary houses. It was situated on low ground, 
wet with the overflow of two rivers. " The houses 
that were built in early days of poverty were low; 
and generally twice a year — in the autumn, and in 
the spring when the snow melted on the mountains — 
the Ohio came booming down and overflowed; and 
men were obliged to emigrate." Mr. Beecher often 
recalled the days of his early ministry, speaking of 
the flock which he found and the flock which he 
gathered; of himself as sexton, lamplighter, church 
sweeper, and general care-taker of the little structure 
wherein he preached, and which was soon crowded 
to overflowing. He says: ** I did not ring the bell 
because there was none to ring, I opened the church 
before prayer-meetings and preaching, and locked it 
when they were over," "We were all poor together. 
And to the day of my death I shall never forget one 
of those faces or hear one of those names spoken 
without having excited in my mind the warmest 
remembrances," ^ 



Life of Beecher," p, 42. 



TESTING HIS WEAPONS. 73 

After a four years' separation from his betrothed, 
Henry Ward Beecher was married on the 3d of 
August, 1837, to Miss Eunice White Bullard, Rev. Mr. 
Tracy being the officiating clergyman. The marriage 
ceremony was postponed for a time that day on 
account of a severe thunder-storm. Mrs. Beecher 
writes: " A Uttle before four o'clock the storm 
departed, and — 

Softly o'er my gladdened heart 
Expands the bow of peace — 

for when Henry took me into the parlor where our 
few guests were waiting, the brightness of the most 
glorious rainbow I had ever seen fell upon us as we 
stood before the clergyman, who ended his prayer 
* And so may the bow of peace and promise ever rest 
upon these Thy servants,' and thus on Bullard's Hill, 
at West Sutton, Massachusetts, Mr. Beecher and I 
were married. Bidding adieu to parents, brothers, 
sisters, and friends, we left the dear old home to go 
out into a world, which unknown to us held so much 
for us." Mr. Beecher had determined to have his wife 
present at his ordination, and hence this journey to 
the East. It is amusing to the men and women of 
this day to read that the most famous of modern 
preachers and his wife who was about to be, on their 
wedding-day, made their own wedding-cake, he pick- 
ing over and stoning the raisins, beating the eggs and 
keeping the whole family in good spirits while the 
hurried preparations went on. 

But the simplicities and homeliness of life in a 
Massachusetts village, a half century and more 
ago, are very enchanting compared with the hard- 



74 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

ships on which Mr. and Mrs. Beecher were soon 
to enter in their Western parish. Beginning house- 
keeping on a meager salary, in two rooms upstairs 
over a stable; calling in the assistance of the paternal 
household on Walnut Hills, securing a cooking- 
stove from a brother, and dishes from a Seminary 
classmate, and a variety of things from " Father 
Beecher and Mrs. Stowe"; cleaning out the dirty 
rooms with their own hands, with indomitable pluck 
and the merriest good nature — such w^ere the prepa- 
rations made by this loving couple for their first 
home. The wife eked out the meager salary by tak- 
ing in sewing and later by taking in boarders. Of 
his home-life Mrs. Beecher says: " Home was always 
the place, whether in early or later life, where Mr. 
Beecher shone the brightest; where the noblest and 
best parts of his character were the most thoroughly 
developed and best understood. There he never 
failed to reveal himself in his best and happiest 
moods." ^ Although he had not been an early riser, he 
very soon discovered, after his marriage, that early ris- 
ing would make the work of the household much 
easier, and this habit, learned at that time, continued 
through his life. Much of his writing and reading was 
done before breakfast. 

Mr. Beecher began his pastoral work with distinct 
ideas and plans which he set down in his journal 
The Church which he had come to was nearly extinct, 
and it was not possible to one of his temper to have 
anything to do w^th a moribund organization if he 
were capable of infusing into it any of his own 



* The Ladies' Hojne Journal, Nov. 1 891. 



TESTING HIS WEAPONS. 75 

superabundant life. His plans included thorough 
house-to-house visitation, and the securing of a large 
congregation from the beginning, which he put fore- 
most, and the inspiring in others of a sense of per- 
sonal responsibility. To gain a congregation he 
determined to preach well uniformly, to visit widely, 
and to secure the love of the young. He was then a 
pensioner of the American Home Missionary Society, 
and it is very suggestive to remember that the funds 
given by patriotic Christian benevolence in the East 
went to the support of one who, in later time return- 
ing to the East, was to fire many hearts with enthu- 
siasm for that home-missionary work whose large 
claims and possibilities he, like his great father, so 
thoroughly understood. 

In September, 1838, he applied for ordination. The 
Presbyterian Church had been rent into two conten- 
tious bodies. The Oxford Presbytery had determined 
to ordain no one who did not connect himself with the 
Old-School Presbyterian Church. Dr. Beecher had 
been charged with heresy, slander, and hypocrisy ! 
Henry Ward applied to the Oxford Presbytery for 
ordination, going to the meeting on horseback, and 
nearly losing his life in crossing a swollen river. 
Deep interest was aroused by his application. Here 
was an opportunity of showing the laxity of Dr. 
Lyman Beecher's theological views. But the 
examination to which Henry Ward was subjected 
revealed him as incorrigibly orthodox, and a unani- 
mous vote was passed to receive him. But the next 
day the Presbytery, foreseeing the peril of losing the 
candidate, passed two resolutions, one sincerely adher- 
ing to the Old-School General Assembly, and the 



76 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Other requiring all licentiates and candidates under 
their care to do the same, or be no longer such. " I 
being my father's son, spurned the idea of going over 
to the Old School; I felt as big as forty men; and 
when that resolution passed, I simply said: * Well, 
brethren, I have nothing to do but to go back to my 
father's house.' They were kind to me; they seemed 
to have conceived an affection for the young man; 
. . . they tried to persuade me to comply with 
their wish; but I was determined, and said, ' I won't.' 
I always had the knack of saying that and sticking 
to it!" His papers were given back to him, and he 
returned to Lawrenceburg. Recounting, on the next 
Sunday, to his own people the proceedings of the 
Oxford Presbytery, they voted to withdraw from it, 
and to become an independent Presbyterian Church. 
Those were the dark and distressful days of clash- 
ing synods and warring presbyteries. But on Nov. 9, 
1838, Beecher applied to the New-School Presbytery 
in Cincinnati for ordination over the Independent 
Presbyterian Church at Lawrenceburg. He was then 
ordained. It is important to remember that, as he 
himself said, his whole life took its color to a consid- 
erable degree from the controversies in the church 
at that time. These bitter and dividing quarrels were 
far from being to his taste, and he came to disregard 
organizations and to cherish a warm love to all 
denominations and a willingness to cooperate 
with all. He made up his mind with divine help 
never to engage in religious contention. " I remem- 
ber riding through the woods for long, dreary days, 
and I recollect at one time coming out into an open 
place where the sun shone down through the bank of 



TESTING HIS WEAPONS. 77 

the river, and where I had such a sense of the love of 
Christ, of the nature of His work on earth, of its 
beauty and grandeur, and such a sense of the misera- 
bleness of Christian men quarreling and seeking to 
build up antagonistic churches — in other words the 
Kingdom of Christ rose up before my mind with 
such supreme loveliness and majesty — -that I sat in my 
saddle I do not know how long (many, many minutes, 
perhaps half an hour), and there, all alone, in a great 
forest of Indiana, probably twenty miles from any 
house, prayed for that Kingdom, saying audibly ' I 
will never be a sectary." These scenes and experiences 
in his rough Western life he justly regarded as in some 
respects a better theological school than Lane Semi- 
nary. What an immense and wide impression these 
profound early convictions made not only on his life, 
but on the mind of American Christendom ! More 
than any other man he was destined to show that the 
body of Christ, His Church, is mercilessly crucified 
and mangled on the cross of a fanatical, unwise, 
distorted devotion to Church organization and 
secondary truths. 

Mrs. Beecher writes: " How vividly I recall that 
first Sabbath! How young, how boyish he did look! 
And how indignant I felt when some of the higher 
classes came in out of simple curiosity, to see the sur- 
prised, almost scornful looks that were interchanged! 
He read the first hymn and read it well, as they had 
never heard their own ministers (often illiterate, 
uneducated men) read hymns. I watched the expres- 
sion change on their faces. Then the first prayer! 
It was a revelation to them; and when he began the 
sermon the critical expression had vanished, and they 



78 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

evidently settled themselves to hear in earnest." * 
A deep impression was made from the start by the 
preaching of the new minister. He became uni- 
versally popular on account of his freedom of 
intercourse with all classes. He sought out the 
neglected, and had frequent discussions with an 
infidel shoemaker. He himself says: " I preached 
some theology. I had just come out of the Seminary 
and retained some portions of systematic theology 
which I used when I had nothing else; and as a man 
chops straw and mixes it with Indian meal in order 
to distend the stomach of the ox that eats it, so I 
chopped a little of the regular orthodox theology 
that I might sprinkle it with the meal of the Lord 
Jesus Christ. But my horizon grew larger and larger 
in that one idea of Christ.^ 

The first child was born to the Beecher house- 
hold while in Lawrenceburg. In 1839 he v/as called 
to the Second Presbyterian Church, of Indianapolis, 
at a salary of six hundred dollars. He declined the 
call, but it was renewed, and he declined it the second 
time. In his perplexity he consented at last to lay 
the matter before the Synod, and, as the Synod urged 
him to accept, he finally agreed to do so. Thus, as his 
horizon of thought and experience widened, there came 
a widening of opportunity. He never sought promo- 
tion, he never hung around idle " waiting for a good 
offer^' he believed in entering the first field that God 
opened and letting Him swing wide the gate to a 



1 " Biography," p. 173. 

^ Statement of Belief before the New York and Brooklyn Asso- 
ciation. — *' Life of Beecher," p. 491. 



TESTING HIS WEAPONS. 79 

larger field. He knew the joy of the ministry from the 
beginning, and, without expecting to accomplish much, 
he did his best faithfully from the start. He had no 
false humility as a servant of Christ, and was willing to 
wear old clothing which kindly friends gave him. " I 
could have said, ' Humph! pretty business! Son of 
Lyman Beecher, President of the Theological Semi- 
nary, in this miserable hole, where there is no church 
and where there are no elders and no men to make 
them out of.' . . . But I was delivered from such 
feeling. I remember that I used to ride out in the 
neighborhood and preach to the destitute, and that 
my predominating feeling was thanksgiving that God 
had permitted me to preach the unsearchable riches 
of His grace." Mr. Beecher was always a man of 
largest sympathies and of unbounded generosity, but 
having endured hardships himself and been happy in 
them, having known the trials of sickness and pov- 
erty on the frontier, he had little patience with that 
phase of socialism which demands that the poor 
should be clothed without responsible effort on their 
part, and with that complaining spirit which is usu- 
ally associated with idleness and want of character. 
Some of his expressions which gave great offense in 
his later years should be interpreted in the light of 
his own experiences and of his conviction that a cer- 
tain amount of discipline and trial is far better than 
indolence, unearned luxury, and undeserved ease. 



CHAPTER IX. 

INDIANAPOLIS. THE WESTERN EVANGELIST. 

Lawrenceburg was the first school in Mr. Beecher's 
apprenticeship in the divine art of preaching. He had 
already learned how to make people eager to hear him. 
In his new field in Indianapolis he was to learn how 
to reach people with the Gospel message, so that 
convictions, heart, and life should be changed by it. 
There, too, he was to make his chief contribution to 
the grandest and most urgent of all American causes 
and problems, Western evangelization. Without doubt 
he was the greatest of all home-missionary preachers. 
Others may have labored longer and with larger im- 
mediate results: otliers may have been the founders 
of Churches which have had a more imposing and 
fruitful history than even the noble Church which he 
served in Indianapolis, and which has numbered 
among its later pastors several distinguished men. 
But Henry Ward Beecher was the most famous and 
effective pulpit orator ever identified with the Great 
West, and into the larger ministry which he was des- 
tined to accomplish in Brooklyn he carried the spe- 
cial training which probably only the West could 
have given him. His memory will be cherished as an 
illustrious example of that Christian patriotism which 
has ennobled the annals of American evangelization. 



INDIANAPOLIS. THE WESTERN EVANGELIST. 8l 

This preacher of unequaled reputation was, for ten 
years, a fellow pioneer with those fine-fibered men and 
women, many of whom left cultured homes in the 
East and endured hardship and sickness for the sake 
of Christ, amid the malarial swamps, the half-cleared 
forests, and the wide prairies of the West, and who 
have since carried the Christian Church, the Christian 
College, the Christian Sabbath, and the Christian 
Home, across rivers and mountains, to the Pacific 
Coast, making sacred by their toils and sacrifices the 
far-reaching fields of the American continent. The 
spirit which moved Mr. Beecher has been equally 
strong in multitudes whose names have gained no 
place even on the margin of the page of history, 
Home-missionary preachers with meagerest salaries, 
Sunday-school missionaries, self-denying presidents 
and founders of colleges, and hundreds of teachers in 
those Christian schools and seminaries which have 
starred with points of sacred light the march of civil- 
ization to the Golden Gate. 

Mr. Beecher's heart was deeply stirred and his im- 
agination was roused by the Christian possibilities of 
the Mississippi Valley, " the mo^ magnificent habi- 
tation " as De Tocqueville has written, ''which the 
Almighty ever prepared for the abode of man." The 
West furnished a nobler field for Christian chivalry 
than did the sea, which had fascinated his dreamy 
and yearning bo3^hood. His knowledge of men, and 
especially of average men, of which he made such 
spendid use in the pulpit, was largely derived from 
the Hoosierized Yankees, in whom the strength of 
New England was mingled with the fervor and 
excitability of the South. The most honored and 
6 



82 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

the most representative of American statesmen was 
born in Kentucky and received his rude training in 
Indiana and Illinois. The excess of the humorous 
habit in Beecher, as in Lincoln, received its justifica- 
tion, or at least its explanation, from some of the 
peculiarities of early Western life. The wit was a 
missionary of light and gladness among the rough 
pioneers who lacked nearly all the devices and 
comforts of civilization. In a life where chills and 
fever entered as a miserable and malign element, 
often for many months of the year, into every house- 
hold, the joker, the man who could bring cheer and 
stir laughter, was a welcome angel. 

The Western preachers were very often distin- 
guished for their power of quick repartee, and wide 
liberty was permitted to the ministerial contestants 
who were wont to meet in a certain store in Indian- 
apolis. It is said that on one occasion, after Mr. Beecher 
had been thrown over his horse's head into the Miami 
River, which he was endeavoring to cross on one of 
his missionary tours, the accident, which was freely 
talked over the next day, induced his friend, the 
Baptist minister, to rally him on the fact that Beecher 
had finally been immersed and had become as good a 
Baptist as anybody. But the quick-witted Beecher 
was more than even with his brother, when he replied, 
with good-natured contempt, " My immersion was a 
different thing from that of your converts. You see 
I was immersed by a horse, not by an ass ! " 

Mr. Beecher carried the West with him to the East, 
and of all American preachers he was the most 
national, we may say continental, in his sympathies. 
There was never anything particularly conventional 



INDIANAPOLIS. THE .WESTERN EVANGELIST. 83 

about any of the Beechers, but we may ascribe in part 
Henry Ward Beeclier's familiar ways in social inter- 
course and the excess of the unconventional in his 
character, in some measure, to his ten years of West- 
ern training. And he was also to carry with him to 
the East that liberal and catholic spirit, usually prev- 
alent among the Christian denominations of the 
Western States, except in the smaller places. And it 
must still further be said that a certain lack of fastid- 
iousness and an occasional lack of refinement in 
speech, a strong preference for the coarser word if it 
happened to be the more expressive, belonged to 
Henry Ward Beecher, and probably gave less offense 
in his Western life than it did in later years when he 
became the pastor of a metropolitan church. 

Mr. Beecher always remembered with tender affec- 
tion the early years of his ministry, " in that glorious, 
rich, warm, abundant Western country." His sister, 
Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, has written: " The West, 
with its wide, rich, exuberant spaces of land, its rolling 
prairies garlanded with rainbows of ever-springing 
flowers, teeming with abundance of food for man, and 
opening in every direction avenues for youthful enter- 
prise and hope, was to him a morning-land. To carry 
Christ's spotless banner in high triumph through such 
a land, was a thing worth living for, and, as he rode 
on horseback alone from day to day along the rolling 
prairie-land, sometimes up to his horse's head in grass 
and waving flowers, he felt himself kindled with a 
sort of ecstasy. The prairies rolled and blossomed 
in his sermons, and his style at this time had a 
tangled luxuriance of poetic imagery, a rush and 
abundance of words, a sort of rich and heavy 



84 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

involution that resembled the growth of a tropical 
forest."^ 

He preached his closing sermon to the people of Law- 
renceburg July 28th, 1839, and removed at once with his 
family to Indianapolis, the capital of the Hoosier State, 
where he was to remain through eight happy and use- 
ful years. The city, which now has a population of 
one hundred and twenty-five thousand, had then 
less than four thousand inhabitants, and it may be 
said that its chief attractions were mud and malaria. 
The inhabitants of what is now one of the most beau- 
tiful and famous of Western towns, then carried on a 
daily battle with dirt and fever. In his reminiscences 
of the city he wrote: " At no time during my residence 
did it reach five thousand (in population). Behold it 
to-day with one hundred and ten thousand inhabi- 
tants ! The Great National Road which at that time 
was of great importance, since sunk into forgetful- 
ness, ran through the city and constituted the main 
street. With the exception of two or three streets 
there were no ways along which could not be seen the 
original stumps of the forests. I bumped against 
them too often in a buggy not to be sure of the fact. 
Here I preached my first real sermon." And, writing 
of the church building which his congregation entered 
soon after his coming, and which was standing in 1877 
he said: " No one can look upon that building as I do. 
A father goes back to his first house, though it be but 
a cabin, where his children were born, with feelings 
that can never be transferred to any other place. As 
I looked long and yearningly upon that homely build- 



' " Men of Our Times," p. 547. 



INDIANAPOLIS. THE WESTERN EVANGELIST. 85 

ing the old time came back again. ... I stood 
and . . . saw a procession of forms going in and 
out, that the outward eye will never see again — Judge 
Morris, Samuel Merril, Oliver H. Smith, D. V. Cully, 
John L. Ketcham, Coburn, Fletcher, Bates, Bullard, 
Munsell, Ackley, O'Neil and many, many more ! 
There have been hours when there was not a hand- 
breadth between us and the saintly host in the invisi- 
ble church! " ^ 

The Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis 
was an offshoot from the First. The separation had 
been occasioned by the prevailing theological dis- 
putes. Two ministers had been sought for and called 
by the Church before Mr. Beecher was invited. 
When he came as their pastor he was twenty-six years 
of age, and the eight years which he spent with this 
people were of measureless importance because they 
shaped in large degree his future style and method of 
preaching. Some of his parishioners deemed him at 
that time the greatest preacher to whom they had 
ever listened. One of them writes an account of his 
immense industry, his early rising, the simplicity of 
his prayers at family worship, the breadth of his ideas, 
his fidelity in his work even when, on account of the 
malarial infliction with which he suffered, he could 
hardly stand up and would fall from exhaustion as soon 
as he entered the door of his own house. 

Another recalls the immediate success of his ministry, 
the increase of the congregation, so that the chapel 
where he first preached became too small and it was 
necessary that a church be built for him. He writes 



1 I 



' Biography," pp. 206, 7, 8. 



86 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

of the attractiveness of the musical services in the new 
edifice, and contrasts the preacher in the Second Pres- 
byterian Church with the *' distinguished divine," in 
the First Presbyterian Church on the opposite side of 
the Circle, the Rev. Phineas D. Gurley, who was Mr. 
Lincoln's pastor at Washington. He recalls Mr. Beech- 
er's fondness for young men and his habit of entering 
into friendly companionship with his people, often 
taking long strolls with those whom he wished to 
capture " His church was crowded every Sabbath, 
both by his own congregation and by visitors from 
other and distant churches. Altliough the pew sys- 
tem obtained, at least one-fourth of the seats (one 
entire section) was reserved for young men and 
strangers. Among them may be named the judges of 
the Supreme, Federal, and Local Courts." ' Although 
he was the pastor of the New-School Church, he al- 
ways cherished some of his warmest and truest 
friends among the families in the Old School. 

Mr. Beecher found that the Gospel of Christ as he 
had learned it from a careful study of the Evangel- 
ists, and as it had been burned into his soul by the 
heat of a great experience, was adequate to the diffi- 
cult and multiform work to which his life was hence- 
forth to be devoted. The truth of God's love in 
Christ could be turned by him in every direction. 
But the adaptation of Divine truth in an effective 
way was to him a slow discovery. He says of him- 
self: " I remember distinctly that every Sunday night 
I had a headache. I went to bed every Sunday night 
with a vow registered that I would buy a farm and 



» " Biography," p. i86. 



INDIANAPOLIS. THE WESTERN EVANGELIST. 87 

quit the ministry." How to adapt his truth to his 
hearers was a discovery resulting from the careful 
examination of the teaching and practice of the 
Apostles. He learned that they laid " a foundation first 
of historical truth common to them and their auditors; 
that this mass of familiar truth was then concentrated 
upon the hearers in the form of an intense applica- 
tion and appeal; that the language was not philos- 
ophical and scholastic, but the language of common 
life." He determined to try a similar method, and 
was made jubilant that the Gospel message was given 
power to touch and renew many souls. He says: " I 
owe more to the Book of Acts and the writings of the 
Apostle Paul than to all other books put together." 
He began a more earnest study of men, and came to 
value sermons only for their useful effects. He had 
learned what must be his way of preaching. " After 
the light dawned, I could see plainly how Jonathan 
Edwards's sermons were so made." 

It is a mistake to suppose that Mr. Beecher lacked 
careful and thorough preparation for his work, or 
that his greatness was due mainly to his .immense 
natural genius. He once said : " No man can preach 
well except out of an abundance of well-wrought 
material." During the years of his intense and form- 
ative Western experience, he made a thorough 
examination of the great English sermonizers, and 
also of Jonathan Edwards, whose words another 
eminent preacher of modern times, Robertson of 
Brighton, absorbed like iron into his blood. Mr. 
Beecher acknowledged his large indebtedness to 
Bishop Butler, to Thomas Sherlocke, to John Howe, 
the profound and contemplative Puritan preacher of 



88 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

the seventeenth century, and to the celebrated divine 
and geometrician, Isaac Barrow, learned and logical, 
if clumsy in style. And he read Robert South 
"through and through." It lends an additional 
interest to the massive and pungent sermons of 
Clarendon's chaplain and Charles the First's staunch 
apologist, to remember that these discourses were 
pored over with a devout and admiring attention by 
our young Puritan preacher of the American back- 
woods, who had no sympathy with " passive obedi- 
ence " and " the divine right of kings," and no 
inclination to stigmatize John Milton as " a blind 
adder who has spit so much poison on the king's 
person and cause." 

It was Mr. Beecher's habit through life never 
to write or speak except on themes which he had 
carefully and widely studied. His preparation 
was usually general rather than special. He had 
a large acquaintance with subjects that were to be 
treated, and he had marvelous facility in utilizing 
for special occasions, as in his great campaign in 
England in 1863, the stored-up results of long and 
thorough study. Another element of his usefulness 
was the rich common sense which he brought to the 
valuation of truth. He varied the emphasis and the 
kind of his religious teaching according to the cir- 
cumstances and conditions which confronted him. 
In the West with its heterogeneous population and 
loose ideas of law and excess of individualism, he 
insisted upon authority, obedience, the usefulness and 
necessity of churches and forms and Sabbath days. 
But, as he says when he was transferred to the East 
and found society hard-iibbed and vigorous and 



INDIANAPOLIS. THE WESTERN EVANGELIST. 89 

tyrannical, he " fought society, and tried to get indi- 
vidual men to be free, independent, and large." 

After the new light which came to him from the 
study of Apostolic methods, revivals soon began to 
bless his Church, and three of these " times of 
refreshing " from on high, were exceedingly fruitful. 
Nearly one hundred were brought into his Church in 
1842. He remembered these periods with a trembling 
and tearful enthusiasm of joy. " Talk of a young 
mother's feelings over her first babe," he wrote, " what 
is that compared with the solemnity, the enthusiasm, 
the impetuosity of gratitude, of humility, of singing 
gladness, with which a young pastor greets the incom- 
ing of his first revival ? He stands upon the shore to 
see the tide come in. It is the movement of the 
infinite, ethereal tide ! It is from the other world ! " 
Large prosperity attended his ministry in Indianapolis, 
the Church increasing eight-fold. He was indefatig- 
able in his work, preaching during one year seventy 
nights in succession. His labor* extended to many 
of the chief towns of the State. Persons who were 
present during the famous Brooklyn Council of 1876, 
will recall with what tenderness, in his great sermon 
on Sunday morning, he referred to those whom he 
had led to Christ in his wide Western ministry, and 
who, he believed, were to give him a choral welcome 
at the gate of Heaven. 

With peculiar interest he remembered the revival 
at Terre Haute. That highland of the Wabash, 
once the dividing line between Canada and Louis- 
iana, was to him a region not of geographical 
but of deepest spiritual significance. One of 
his characteristic and morbid experiences was con- 



90 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

nected with this revival. He had been sent for 
by the Rev. Dr. Jevvett to come and assist him at 
Terre Haute. The call made him helpless and 
wretched, and his two days' lonely ride on horseback 
through the beech forests was continued in a state of 
mental unrest and bewilderment. But he records that 
so soon as he was confronted with the duty of the 
hour, the cloud was lifted and the morbid drooping 
and shrinking were gone. After three happy weeks, 
crowned with great success, he found it hard to go 
back to the common routine of Church life, and, as 
he returned to Indianapolis, he passed through a 
season of wild, tumultuous emotion which ended at 
last in peace and assurance, leading to a summer of 
fruitful toil among his own people. During his ear- ■ 
Her years Mr. Beecher, as already intimated, seemed 
to have little confidence in himself. " For the first 
three years of my ministry," he once said '' I did not 
make a single sinner wink." This lack of self-confi- 
dence and lack of a certain kind of success occasioned 
a degree of morbidness so intense that he frequently 
requested his wife not to attend his meetings. But 
the miserable self-distrust usually disappeared when 
he rose to speak, and he generally returned home 
from his work in a joyful frame of mind. 

Living in the saddle, riding *' from camp-meeting 
to camp-meeting and from log hut to log hut," almost 
the only book this revivalist found time to study was 
the Bible, and he made a renewed and careful exam- 
ination of the Gospels, with great toil compiling 
analyses of their teachings. They became incorpor- 
ated into himself. His younger brother Charles, who 
afterwards gained high repute as a preacher, had aban- 



INDIANAPOLIS. THE WESTERN EVANGELIST. 9I 

doned the ministry on account of his restless mental 
questionings. He lived near to Henry Ward Beecher 
in Indianapolis, and it is recorded that the experience 
of a revival and the studies that came from teaching 
a Bible-class led him to reexamine the life of the Son 
of God, and were the means of preparing him to 
reenter the Gospel ministry. By this large and con- 
stant attention to the Christian Scriptures Henry 
Ward Beecher was gaining not only a new conception 
of the nature of God but a new repugnance to " meta- 
physical doctrines." The truth of personal experience, 
of immediate practical helpfulness, was the truth most 
dear to one who became intimate with every family 
in his Church. This sort of friendly intimacy was 
not a difficult achievement in a Western town, where 
the people made the pastor one of their own house- 
hold and furnished him food and clothing to eke out 
his salary. He was a playfellow with the young, and 
a teacher of unusually stimulating power to a class of 
girls, whom he directed in their reading, attracting 
them toward the poetry of Milton, and warning them 
against Bulwer and the French novelists. 



CHAPTER X. 

A SICK HOUSEHOLD. A STRONG PULPIT. 

His fame as a preacher began to extend beyond the 
bounds of his parish. The members of the State Leg- 
islature were attendants in large numbers. on his min- 
istry, and the men from the great Eastern cities were 
drawn to take notice of his remarkable pulpit power. 
While attending a meeting of the Presbyterian Gen- 
eral Assembly, in Buffalo, he made a fervid address on 
the subject of " Slavery," of such originality and vigor 
that it attracted wide attention. He was a trustee of 
that excellent institution, which has trained many of 
the best Western preachers, Wabash College at Craw- 
fordsville, Indiana, and his personal knowledge of the 
needs of Christian education in the newer States made 
him an enthusiastic and useful friend of small Western 
colleges. 

The amount and quality of his work at this time 
became all the more remarkable when we remember 
the almost continual sickness which afflicted members 
of his family. He had been told that Indianapolis, 
unlike Lawrenceburg, was free from that frightful 
plague of Western frontier life, chills and fever. 
Being anxious for his wife, whose health was not at 
that time strong, and for his little daughter, he was 



A SICK HOUSEHOLD. A STRONG PULPIT. 93 

deeply stirred on discovering, after arriving at Indian- 
apolis, that the inhabitants of that place, or at least 
some of them, had grossly misrepresented the salu- 
brity of their climate. Within a short tirne Mr. and 
Mrs. Beecher were both taken with the prevailing dis- 
temper. Severe sickness followed, and although he 
recovered his former strength the old trouble in a 
milder form frequently returned. * 

The salary of six hundred dollars did not relieve 
the Beecher family from domestic anxiety. They 
moved from place to place, in the town till they 
made their home at last in a one-story house 
which Mr. Beecher was to purchase gradually, pay- 
ing for it at the rate of a hundred dollars a year. 
Though the bedrooms were small and the kitchen 
small, they lived in this house seven years and 
deemed it the happiest home they ever knew. Mr. 
Beecher vibrated incessantly between kitchen and 
study. Mrs. Beecher, frequently sick, was kept much 
of the time from church. Her time was divided 
between chills and household work. With his study- 
table and the cooking-table separated only by a thin 
partition, it is no wonder that Mr. Beecher became 
very well known to his own family. There is a pic- 
turesque rudeness and simplicity about the scenes of 
his life in Indianapolis that have been painted for us. 
We see him helping in all family offices, though con- 
tinually tempted to postpone the washing of dishes; 
we see him wading to church *' ankle-deep in 
mud " and preaching with his pantaloons stuffed into 
his boot-tops; we see him painting his own house as 



^ Ladies^ Home Journal, December, 1891, 



94 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

he painted his father's on Walnut Hills, and devel- 
oping a degree of self-helpfulness that must appear 
to many quite extraordinary. 

During these years in Indianapolis he passed 
through some of those sorrows which helped him in 
after-times to abound richly in sympathy with those 
burdened with grief. There was the accidental shoot- 
ing of his brother George, followed in 1846 by the 
death of George, his third son. Few incidents come 
home to the universal heart more touchingly than that 
which Mr. Beecher described in speaking of the burial 
of this little child — how he waded through the snow, 
carrying the little coffin in his arms, and seeing win- 
ter down at the very bottom of the grave. *' If I 
should live a thousand years," he said, ** I could not 
help shivering every time I thought of it." A friend 
recalls a sermon of Mr. Beecher's and words spoke«i, 
to this effect: '* People sometimes ask me how I am 
able to sympathize with parents in their sorrows. 
Have I not buried my own heart again and again in 
the grave ? " 

While in Indianapolis, Mr. Beecher found relief 
from domestic annoyances and afflictions and from 
the excessive toils of his preaching life, and he found 
also unspeakable delight, as well as rich materials for 
a bewildering variety of illustrations for his future 
sermons, in a renewed and sympathetic study of flow- 
ers. He utilized his fragments of spare time and 
gained a mental refreshment which was greatly 
needed after eighteen consecutive months of daily 
preaching, by the continued reading of Loudon's 
Encyclopaedic works on Horticulture, Agriculture, and 
Architecture. He believed that he had read every 



A SICK HOUSEHOLD. A STRONG PULPIT. 95 

line of these great volumes which he found immensely 
fascinating. Gray's " Structural Botany " and Lind- 
ley's *' Horticulture " were added, and later, the Lon- 
don Gardener s Chrotiicle. " Many hundred times " he 
says, " have we lain awake for hours, unable to 
throw off the excitement of preaching, and beguil- 
ing the time with imaginary visits to the Chis- 
wick Gardens, to the more than Oriental magnifi- 
cence of the Duke of Devonshire's grounds at Chats- 
worth. We have had long discussions at Indianapolis, 
with Van Mons about pears, with Vibert about roses, 
with Thompson and Knight of fruits and theories of 
vegetable life, and with Loudon about everything 
under the heavens in the horticultural world." 

He was more than a closet botanist and gardener. 
Believing thoroughly in manual work, he tilled his 
own garden, grew his own flowers, and often, at the 
dawn of day, took his own vegetables to market. He 
also carried off first prizes at an exhibition of the 
Indiana Horticultural Society. Though he had done 
some newspaper writing at Cincinnati, in Indianapo- 
lis he '' first joined the editorial fraternity and edited 
the Farmer and Gardener y In the columns of that 
journal he gave the Western farmers much good 
advice mixed with much rare humor. Thus uncon- 
sciously he was preparing himself for the battle of the 
giants which was to follow in those days when, as the 
editor of the New York Ifidepende?it, he easily took a 
front rank among the journalists of his time. Mr. 
Beecher was known as a mild Whig while in Indian- 
apolis. The anti-slavery fight was soon to make him 
an Abolitionist, though not training with the Garrison 
party. 



96 .HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Texas had been annexed, and the wicked Mexican 
War, undertaken for the extension of slavery, was in 
progress. The mighty contestants were making 
ready for the great Congressional struggles of 1850, 
and for the more terrible strifes of armies that lay 
beyond. Slavery had become a burning question, 
and though the hostility to Abolitionism was proba- 
bly hotter in the Middle and Eastern States than in 
the West, even in Indianapolis, the subject of slavery 
was a dividing one. Men were red-hot with regard 
to it, and Mr. Beecher reports that one of his elders 
said : " If an Abolitionist comes here, I will head a 
mob and put him down," Those were the days of 
excessive timidity. The chief men of the North 
hated Abolitionism far more than they hated the 
driver's whip or the auction-block. Missionary societies 
were quite as timid as capitalists, and tore anti-slavery 
pages out of their publications. It is a notable evidence 
of Mr. Beecher's practical wisdom that he was able 
to speak on this subject with no uncertain sound, and 
yet ultimately to retain in large measure his strong 
hold on his people. 

Toward the close of his ministry in the West, his 
Presbytery voted to request the Presbyterian clergy- 
men to preach at least one sermon during the year on 
the subject of slavery. Mr. Beecher thought it fit to 
preach three sermons on this topic. In the first of these 
he spoke of ancient slavery, especially among the 
Hebrews, in the second he presented the doctrine 
and practice of the New Testament in respect to 
slavery, and in the final sermon he discussed the 



A SICK HOUSEHOLD, A STRONG PULPIT. 97 

moral aspects of slavery, attacking the gigantic evil 
with characteristic earnestness. As he doubtless 
expected, his words aroused the wrath of the pro- 
slavery church-members and the excited fears of the 
timid, some of whom went so far as to seek for letters 
of dismissal from the Church. The town was full 
of excitement. Judge McLean, of the United States 
Supreme Court, was one among Mr. Beecher's many 
listeners, and he admired the manly boldness of the 
outspoken preacher. When he remarked to an excited 
group of Hoosiers : " If every minister in the United 
States would be as faithful it would be a great 
advance in settling this question," he did much to 
turn the tide of feeling. With further deliberation 
men began to see things differently, and Mr. Beecher 
found himself able in his youth, as so often in his 
manhood, to note the tide turning his way, and as 
usual his temporary disrepute was followed by higher 
admiration and esteem. 

The fearless preacher had many evils to attack 
besides slavery, and he had no hesitation in rebuking 
the prevailing sins. After he had denounced from 
the pulpit an act of brutality, committed by a noto- 
rious man of the city, his people feared lest he should 
suffer bodily injury from the irate offender. And 
indeed the next morning the angry sinner encountered 
him, as he passed the hotel, and, pistol in hand, 
demanded if he made those remarks, and if they were 
directed against him. Mr. Beecher replied affirma- 
tively, when the ruffian said, with an oath: "Take it 
back right here or I'll shoot you on the spot." "Shoot 
away," was the calm reply, as Mr. Beecher walked on. 
The bully followed him for a few steps and then 



98 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

slunk back to the hotel. On another occasion at a 
meeting for the enforcement of the law against the 
gamblers and liquor-sellers who were doing much to 
ruin many of his young men, Mr. Beecher denounced 
one of the criminals, who was present, to his very 
face. The ruffian threatened to whip him at the next 
encounter. Meeting him soon after Mr. Beecher 
bowed and said " Good morning, Mr. Bishop," and 
passed on. A year or two later this man opened his 
whole heart to the brave pastor and rendered him 
personal service. 

The temptations at the State capital were so terri- 
ble and numerous that the young preacher became 
distressed for the souls of imperiled youth. All the 
vices flourished in rank luxuriance, and Mr. Beecher 
determined to meet these evils with a series of 
addresses to young men. First he made a careful 
study of the arts and devices by which the young are 
led to moral ruin. The result was a series of lectures 
to young men, afterwards published, which for bold- 
ness, insight, and tropical eloquence have probably 
never been equaled. Friends of Lyman Beecher 
recalled the spirit which blazed forth in his six ser- 
mons against intemperance. Dr. Leonard Bacon in 
every discourse " seemed to see sparks as from the 
red-hot iron on the old anvil, and to hear the old 
Boanerges thunder with a youthful voice." The 
immediate effect of these lectures, however strong and 
salutary, was small compared with the wider effects 
produced by their publication and large circulation, 
both in England and America. Mr. Beecher was slow 
in heeding the urgent requests of his friends to revise 
and print these discourses. When he compared them 



A SICK HOUSEHOLD. A STRONG PULPIT. 99 

with the sermons of Dr. Isaac Barrow, he was so 
impressed with the inieriority of his own work that 
he took up his manuscript and " fired it across the 
room and under the book-case," where it lay 
untouched for awhile. Mr. Beecher rarely " had the 
patience to revise " which Mr. Spurgeon utilized for 
many years with such advantage to the whole English- 
speaking world. 

It is fortunate that Mr. Beecher's addresses to 
young men, so fresh and vital, so full of power 
and splendor, of humor, indignation, originality 
of thought, and careful observation, were not left 
under the book-case. As we re-read the volume 
to-day it appears as true to life as when the words 
were first spoken. Its reality makes to a large degree 
its power. He discusses idleness in all its forms, and, 
with no commonplaceness of thought or expression, 
he portrays the perils and punishments of indolence. 
He speaks of dishonesty and tells of its causes. He 
utters his solemn warnings against the thought that 
riches necessarily confer happiness; against a wicked 
haste to be rich; against covetousness; against the 
canker of selfishness; against covert dishonesty and 
against violent extortion. 

What a picture he has given of the Behemoth 
of Rapacity ! " Men there are, who, without a 
pang or gleam of remorse, will coolly wait for 
a character to rot, and health to sink, and means 
to melt, that they may suck up the last drop 
of the victim's blood. Our streets are full of 
reeling wretches whose bodies and manhood and 
souls have been crushed and put to the press that 
monsters might wring out of them a wine for their 



lOO HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

infernal thirst. The agony of midnight massacre, the 
frenzy of the ship's dungeon, the living death of the 
middle passage, the wails of separation, and the dis- 
mal torpor of hopeless servitude — are these found 
only in the piracy of the slave-trade ? They are all 
among us. Worse assassinations! Worse dragging 
to a prison ship ! Worse groans ringing from the 
fetid hold! Worse separations of families! Worse 
bondage of intemperate men, enslaved by that most 
inexorable of all task-masters, sensual habit!" 

Then who can fail to remember the pictures in 
Beecher's Portrait Gallery, the Wit, the Humorist, the 
Cynic, the Libertine, the Politician, the Demagogue, 
the Party Man ? The Gambler's character is depicted 
with the terrible power and realism of Hogarth, and 
with more than his splendor. The evils of gambling 
in ruining the mind, in destroying domestic affection, 
in its affiliation with other vices, in its provocation of 
thirst and its inevitable connection with dishonesty 
have never been set forth with more vividness nor has 
any other homilist pointed out more clearly the peril 
of the first imperceptible steps to wickedness. 

" Oh ye who have thought the way to hell was bleak 
and frozen as Norway, parched and barren as Sahara, 
strewed like Golgotha with bones and skulls, reeking 
with stench like the vale of Gehenna,- — witness your 
mistake! The way to hell is gorgeous! It is a high- 
way, cast up; no lion is there, no ominous bird to 
hoot a warning, no echoings of the wailing pit, no 
lurid gleams of distant fires, or moaning sounds of 
hidden woe! Paradise is imitated to build you away 
to death; the flowers of Heaven are stolen and 
poisoned; the sweet plant of knowledge is here; the 



A SICK HOUSEHOLD. A STRONG PULPIT. lOI 

pure white flower of religion; seeming virtue and the 
charming tints of innocence are scattered all along 
like native herbage. The enchanted victim travels 
on. Standing far behind, and from a silver trumpet, 
a Heavenly messenger sends down the wind a solemn 
warning: THERE IS A WAY WHICH SEEMETH 
RIGHT TO MAN BUT THE END THEREOF 
IS DEATH. And again, with louder blast: THE 
WISE MAN FORESEETH THE EVIL; FOOLS 
PASS ON AND ARE PUNISHED. Startled for a 
moment, the victim pauses; gazes round upon the 
flowered scene, and whispers ' Is it not hai^mless ? ' — 
* Harmless,' responds a serpent from the grass ! — 
'Harmless' echoes the sighing winds; 'Harmless* 
reecho a hundred airy tongues. If now a gale from 
Heaven might only sweep the clouds away through 
which the victim gazes; Oh ! if God would break 
that potent power which chains the blasts of hell, and 
let the sulphur scent roll up the vale, how would the 
vision change! The road becomes a track of dead 
men's bones. The heavens a lowering storm. The 
balmy breezes, distant wailing — and all those balsam- 
shrubs that lied to the senses, sweat drops of blood 
upon their poison-boughs." 

*' Ye who are meddling with the edges of vice, ye 
are on this road ! — and utterly duped by its enchant- 
ments ! Your eye has already lost its honest glance, 
your taste has lost its purity, your heart throbs with 
poison ! The leprosy is all over you, its blotches and 
eruptions cover you. Your feet stand on slippery 
places, whence in due time they shall slide if you refuse 
the warning which I raise. They shall slide from that 
Heaven never to be visited by a gambler; slide down 



102 HENRY WARD TEECHER. 

to that fiery abyss below you out of which none ever 
come. Tlien, when the last card is cast, and the game 
over, and you lost ; then, when the echo of your fall 
shall ring through hell, — in malignant triumph, shall 
the Arch-Gambler, who cunningly played for your 
soul, have his prey ! Too late you shall have looked 
back upon life as a Mighty Game, in which you were 
the stake, and Satan the winner." 

We may search in vain in literature for any equally 
lurid portrayal of the folly of so-called harmless sins. 
There are pages in these lectures that remind one of the 
most sensational and terrible scores of Berlioz and Wag- 
ner. Some of these are found in the chapter on " The 
Strange Woman "and others in the final lecture on 
" Popular Amusements," which closes with the famous 
and terrible apostrophe to the corrupter of youth. 
** I would not take thy death for all the pleasure of 
thy guilty life a thousandfold. Thou shalt draw near 
to the shadow of death. To the Christian, these 
shades are the golden haze which Heaven's light 
makes when it meets the earth and mingles with its 
shadows. But to thee, these shall be shadows full of 
phantom-shapes. Images of terror in the Future 
shall dimly rise and beckon ; the ghastly deeds of the 
Past shall stretch out their skinny hands to push thee 
forward ! Thou shalt not die unattended. Despair 
shall mock thee. Agony shall tender to thy parched 
lips her fiery cup. Remorse shall feel for thy heart, 
and rend it open. Good men shall breathe freer at 
thy death, and utter thanksgiving when thou art 
gone. Men shall place thy gravestone as a monu- 
ment and testimony that a plague is stayed ; no tear 
shall wet it, no mourners linger there ! And, as 



A SICK HOUSEHOLD. A STRONG PULPIT. TO3 

borne on the blast, thy guilty spirit whistles through 
the gate of hell, the hideous shrieks of those whom 
thy hand hath destroyed, shall pierce thee — hell's 
first welcome. In the bosom of that everlasting 
storm which rains perpetual misery in hell, shalt thou, 
Corrupter of Youth! be for ever hidden from our 
view : And may God wipe out the very thoughts of 
you from our memory." ^ 

His "Lectures to Young Men" is said to have been 
the first book by an Indiana author, to be honored by 
a republication in Great Britain. Mr. Beecher's voice 
was to be heard again in England, and, with matured 
powers, he was to champion the cause of American 
liberty and nationality. The change in the style of 
speech between those florid and over-languaged 
lectures in the Hoosier city and the keen, swift, 
straightforward sentences which he shot, like arrows, 
at the mob in Liverpool, is a most interesting study 
aud a remarkable illustration, not only of Mr. 
Beecher's intellectual growth, but of that consummate 
genius which speaks the right word in the right way* 



* " Lectures to Young Men," p. 251. 



CHAPTER XL 

CALL TO BROOKLYN. EARLY REVIVALS. 

Mr. Beecher's ten years of Western life were his 
rough, varied, and wholesome schooling for the much 
larger opportunities soon to open before him. His 
great nature had expanded and ripened in the intense 
and many-sided exertions of that interesting expe- 
rience. His heart was in the West, but Mrs. Beecher 
had been sick almost continually and did not take 
kindly to Hoosier life as it then was. The beautiful 
city of Indianapolis, as it now is, w^as not the city 
one hundred and twenty thousand, was not the city 
of chills and fevers with which she was familiar. Her 
health had been so seriously impaired that Mr. 
Beecher was finally persuaded, in 1847, to accept a call 
extended by the Plymouth Congregational Church 
in Brooklyn, New York. Dr. Lyman Beecher was 
strongly and almost sternly opposed to his son's going 
East. Henry Ward Beecher believed that if God had 
work for him in a different sphere of activity He would 
make it as plain to him as He did to Abraham. He 
had no thought or purpose of seeking a new field of 
work, but he wrote that he had an immovable plan in 
regard to the objects which he should pursue. 

" So help me God, I do not mean to be a. party man^ 
nor to head nor follow any partisan effort; I desire to 



CALL TO BROOKLYN. EARLY REVIVALS. I05 

aid in a development of truth and in the production of 
goodness by it. I do not care in whose hands truth may- 
be found, or in what communion; I will thankfully 
take it of any. Nor do I feel bound in any sort to 
look upon untruth or mistake with favor because it 
lies within the sphere of any Church to which I may 
be attached. I do not have that mawkish charity 
which seems to arise from regarding all tenets as 
pretty much alike — the charity, in fact, of indiffereiice 
— but another sort; a hunger for what is true, an 
exultation in the sight of it, and such an estimate and 
glory in the truth as it is in Christ, that no distinction 
of sect or form shall be for one moment worthy to be 
compared with it. I will overleap anything that 
Stands between me and truth. Whoever loves the 
Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity and in truth is my brother. 
He that doeth God's will was, in Christ's judgment, 
His mother. His sister, His brother, His friend, His 
disciple." ^ 

Mr, Beecher's genius was recognized by a limited 
circle in the East. Mr. Wm. T. Cutter, of Brooklyn, 
one of the fathers of Plymouth Church, had visited 
him in the West in the autumn of 1846, and to this 
ardent believer in Mr, Beecher great credit is due for 
his labors in securing Plymouth Church its illustrious 
pastor. Mr. Beecher had been informed that a new 
Congregational Church was to be organized in 
Brooklyn, and that the property formerly owned by 
the First Presbyterian Church, of which the famous 
Dr. Samuel Hanson Cox was pastor, had been pur- 
chased, and that if he would accept a call given by this 



* '* Biography," p. 212. 



I06 HENRY WARD REECHER. 

new congregation, a salary of fifteen hundred dollars, 
and probably of two thousand dollars, would be given 
him. Mr. Beecher was unwilling even to consider 
the proposition, but he accepted an invitation to 
address the American Home Missionary Society that 
year at the May Anniversary in New York. Unsus- 
pectingly he was caught in this trap prepared for him 
by William T. Cutter. This visit resulted in the 
formation of Plymouth Church, the chief promoters 
of the enterprise being David Hale of the Journal of 
Commerce, John T. Howard, and Henry C. Bowen. 
The idea which dominated the founders of this 
famous Church was ^^ to combine the descendants of 
the Pilgrims in a new and more general movement to 
introduce democratic and Puritan principles and 
policy into ecclesiastical affairs." ^ The people were 
in solemn earnest, and faithful in their frequent meet- 
ings for prayer. One of the early members testifies 
that " if ever a church was founded in a thorougli 
consciousness of weakness and with strong wrestling 
in prayer, with cries and tears before God, it was the 
Plymouth Church." Mr. Beecher preached for this 
people on his visit to New York, a discourse on 
" Man's Accountability to God." It was rigidly 
orthodox in its teachings and pungent and searching 
in its applications. In this sermon he said: "I know 
not what I will do when God calls my soul to judg- 
ment. I know when I shall look back on my life it 
will be folly to attempt to justify anything I have ever 
done. I will turn to Christ and say, * Thou hast 
promised to save me if I would trust in Thee, and I 



I (• 



Plymouth Church Silver "Wedding," p. 40. 



CALL TO BROOKLYN. EARLY REVIVALS. T07 

have trusted in Thee and now I claim the fulfillment 
of Thy promise, O Lord! Here I am, and my only 
hope is in Thee.' And then Christ will throw around 
about me the shield of His righteousness, not because 
I am not a sinner, but because I am a sinner, loved 
and shielded of Christ." ^ 

Mr. Beecher would not consider a call to the 
Church which did not really exist, and which was 
houseless as well as non-existent. Accordingly, on 
Sunday evening, June 13, 1847, Plymouth Church 
was organized with a membership of twenty-one, on 
the very ground which was afterward occupied by 
the building which Mr. Beecher made famous in the 
annals of freedom, and which divides with the Old 
South Church of Boston the honor of being the 
historic Church of America. Rev. Richard S. Storrs, 
Jr., pastor of the Church of the Pilgrims, preached 
the sermon on this eventful occasion, and on the fol- 
lowing day Mr. Beecher was unanimously invited by 
Church and society to become their pastor. He was 
not permitted to rest from considering this call. Mr. 
Bowen sent him nearly thirty letters urging his 
acceptance.* 

All the arguments and inducements which were 
powerfully brought to bear upon him would very 
likely have utterly failed had it not been evident 
that Mrs. Beecher's health, and probably her life, 
were jeoparded by a longer abiding in the West. 
After two months of deliberation, during which he 
realized how loth he was to leave his *' Indiana 



* •' The History of Plymouth Church," by Noyes L. Thompson, 
p. 56. 2 " Plymouth Church Silver Wedding," p. 90. 



Io8 HENRY WARD imECIIFR. 

bishopric," he decided to relinquish his pastoral 
charge in Indianapolis, and in a letter of great tend- 
erness directed to the Elders of the Second 
Presbyterian Church, he gave in his resignation. 
Seven da)'s later he wrote to the committee of Ply- 
mouth Church an acceptance of their call, expressing 
his diffidence in regard to the responsibilities of the 
new field and also his perfect trust in the Saviour he 
was to preach. On breaking up his home he distrib- 
uted among a half dozen friends the rare plants and 
precious exotics which he had gathered, and also left 
with them the fragrance of a loving and consecrated 
life, whose memory lingers still in the traditions of 
the city. 

He had received and declined a call from the 
famous Park Street Church, Boston, in the sum- 
mer of 1847. He preferred to build on new foun- 
dations. Aided by the characteristic generosity of 
Plymouth Church he was enabled to pay his debts 
in Indianapolis, and removed with his family in Octo- 
ber to Brooklyn. One of the founders of Plymouth 
Church, Mr. John T. Howard, writes of the great joy 
which his letter of acceptance brought to Brooklyn. ^ 

'' It would probably seem rather a comical sight 
to the younger members of the Church to see 
Mr. Bowen and myself in each other's arms, cry- 
ing and laughing and capering about like a couple 
of schoolboys ; yet that sight might have been 
seen the evening that Mr. Bowen came to my house 
with a letter which he had received from Mr. Beecher, 
It was sealed with one of those little picture seals of 



^ Howard's " Life," pp. 131-132. 



CALL TO BROOKLYN, EARLY REVIVALS. IO9 

paper in vogue in those days. The picture was a 
gate thrown from its fastenings, and the motto * I am 
all unhinged.* That told the story, and the result 
we are rejoicing over during this happy week." ' 

When we consider the immense consequences to 
the political and religious history of America result- 
ing from this transfer, we are reminded of Abraham 
Lincoln's departure, fourteen years later, from another 
Western capital to enter upon the solemn duties of 
the Presidency. Mr. Beecher's journey, however, w^as 
unheralded and uneventful, although interesting 
from the fact that he is said to have left Indianapolis on 
the first passenger train which was run on a recently 
built railroad. Mrs. Beecher was doubtless overjoyed 
in the hope of restored health, although if the inci- 
dent be true, the journey was not one of unmixed 
pleasure. It is said that Mr. Beecher, youthful and 
happy, was exceedingly attentive to the delicate and 
sad-faced wife who had so long been an invalid. He 
jumped from the train at one of the stations to pro- 
vide for her bodily needs. But an old lady, attracted 
by Mrs. Beecher's miserable looks, said to her with 
encouraging sympathy : " Cheer up, my dear madam, 
cheer up. Surely whatever may be your trial, you 
have cause for great thankfulness to God who has 
given you such a kind and attentive son." 

The Brooklyn of 1847 was a village compared with 
the splendid city of to-day. All the churches are 
said to have been within a mile of Fulton Ferry, and 
boys are reported to have picked blackberries within 
a quarter of a mile of the present City Hall, before 



* " Plyinoiilh Church Silver Wedding," p. 51, 



no HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

which the bronze statue of Henry Ward Beecher now 
stands. The leading preachers in the City of Churches 
in 1846 were: the Rev. H. S. Spencer, D. D., the vigor- 
ous and argumentative pastor of the Second Presby- 
terian Church; the eloquent and stately Dr. Francis 
Vinton, of the Emmanuel Church; the Rev .S. T. Spear, 
of the South Presbyterian Church; Dr. J. S. Stone, 
of Christ Church; the Rev. M. W. Jacobus, of the 
First Presbyterian Church; the Rev. M. W. D wight, 
of the First Dutch Church; the Rev. S. M. Wood- 
bridge of the South Dutch Church; the Rev. Jacob 
Brodhead, D. D., of the Central Dutch Church; the 
Rev. B. B. Cutler, D. D., of St. Ann's Protestant 
Episcopal Church; the Rev. George Duffield, of the 
Fifth Presbyterian Church; the learned and eccentric 
Dr. Samuel Hanson Cox, " with mind like an auroral 
heaven"; and the youthful pastor of the Church of 
the Pilgrims, then the Rev. Richard S. Storrs, Jr., 
who still holds on in his radiant way, the undisputed 
master among living Americans of all the graces and 
powers of the loftiest pulpit eloquence. 

It was greatly feared by many that Mr. Beecher, 
however successful he may have been as a Western 
missionary, would not be found adequate to the 
requirements of a cultivated Eastern city. They 
feared that his bold utterances and original ways, and 
especially his habit of outspoken denunciation on the 
subject of slavery, would never be tolerated in New 
York, the metropolis, of which Brooklyn, then a town 
of sixty thousand people, was the sleeping-room. It 
was prophesied that his career would be disastrously 
brief, and even friends and relatives appeared to doubt 
the results of his sudden change. But Mr. Beecher 



CALL TO BROOKLYN. EARLY REVIVALS. IH 

came to Brooklyn with a stout heart and with a single 
thought — zeal for Christ — to preach what he under- 
stood to be the Gospel of Christ; and his first sermon 
on October ii, 1847, was directed to the Lord Jesus 
and His power as the source of all true religion. 
In the evening he plainly told his people that he 
had come to apply Christianity to intemperance, to 
slavery, and to all the great national sins, that he 
would apply it without stint and sharply and strongly, 
and that he was to wear no fetters and to be bound 
by no precedent. And, in spite of the warnings of 
fearful friends, he continued to announce his purpose 
and programme every year, especially just before the 
annual renting of pews. There were few churches 
within the bounds of New York and Brooklyn which 
at that time had the courage to speak a brave word 
for liberty. It is no wonder that a Church thus 
sifted, like Plymouth Church from the start, and con- 
secrated by its great leader, should have become a 
landmark in the history of liberty and of civilization 
in the New World. 

Mr. Beecher was publicly installed on the nth of 
the following November. The examination of the 
candidate by the Council which had been summoned 
was extended and thorough. He proved unpleasantly 
rusty in his theology, and not up to the New England 
standard in his orthodoxy, but his wit was never 
lacking. To the question of Dr. Humphrey, who 
was his college President — '^ Do you believe in the 
preservance of the saints ? " Mr. Beecher replied : 
"I was brought up to believe that doctrine, and I 
did believe it till I went out West and saw how East- 
ern Christians lived when they went out there. I 



112 HENRY WARD I3EECHER. 

confess since then I have had my doubts." Though 
many of his answers were unexpected and startling, 
a unanimous vote sustained the examination. Dr. 
Bushnell said : " I am glad to find one candidate who 
knows the Lord Jesus and His Gospel."^ Some of 
those who had part in the installation services were 
themselves men of high rank. Besides the Rev. Dr. 
Hewitt, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the Rev. Dr. 
Lansing, of New York, there was the Rev. Dr. Hum- 
phrey, of Pittsfield, Mass., one of a distinguished 
family ; there was the preacher of the sermon, the 
Rev. Dr. Edward Beecher, then of the Salem Church, 
Boston; there was Dr. Horace Bushnell of Hartford, 
who that year had published his masterly work on 
Christian Nurture ; there was the Rev. Joseph P. 
Thompson, of the Broadway Tabernacle, of New 
York, the eminent scholar and later one of the 
chief editors of The Independent ; and there was the 
Rev. Richard S. Storrs, Jr., of the Church of the 
Pilgrims, by one year Mr. Beecher's senior in service 
in Brooklyn, although eight years his junior in age. 

A great metropolitan center, like 'New York and 
Brooklyn, was required for the unequaled career upon 
which Mr. Beecher was now to enter. Men have been 
great preachers in small places, as Edwards, Bush- 
nell, Jeremy Taylor, Richard Baxter, Robertson, 
Kingsley, and many others abundantly witness. But, 
under the conditions of modern life, the successful 
leadership in political and religious reform which Mr. 
Beecher achieved was possible only in theconspicuity 
and far-reaching influence of a great commercial and 



*" Plymouth Church Silver Wedding," p. 52. 



CALL TO BROOKLYN. EARLY REVIVALS. II3 

intellectual capital like New York. The year 1847 is, 
therefore, a chief landmark in his life. 

The saintly William Ellery Channing had passed 
away five years before. More than a year had 
elapsed since Theodore Parker had begun his 
prodigious labors in Boston, where he accom- 
plished a notable work in arousing the North- 
ern conscience in regard to slavery. Lowell was 
writing his unequaled and stinging satires, the First 
Series of the "Biglow Papers." George William Curtis 
was sauntering through Europe, and had not yet begun 
to exercise his gentle and yet powerful influence over 
the whole higher life of America. Horace Greeley 
had for six years been conducting The New York Trib- 
une; Sumner had just begun his great anti-slavery 
work; Lincoln was serving his only term in Congress; 
Chase was acting as attorney-general for runaway 
negroes, and Garrison and Phillips were leading the 
forlorn hope of Abolitionism. In the year following 
John Quincy Adams, the champion of the right of 
petition in Congress, was to close his great career. 

Those who were famous men in the pulpit of that day 
have nearly all of them fallen into obscurity. The 
elaborate and eloquent portrayal of that time, or 
more accurately of the year previous, which Dr. 
Richard S. Storrs has given in his Memorial Sermon 
on the Church of the Pilgrims, preserves a great 
number of names lustrous in their own community 
during their lives, which stir but few memories in a 
younger generation. Rev. Theodore L. Cuyler had 
graduated from Princeton Seminary, but had not 
yet been ordained to the ministry. Other eminent 
pastors and preachers, dear to the hearts of this gen- 
8 



114 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

eration, were then boys at school. The name of 
Henry Ward Beecher has grown, in spite of temporary 
obscurations, more potent and luminous with the 
passing years, not only because of his preeminent 
genius, but also from the fact that his career became 
intimately identified with what the Duke of Argyle 
has pronounced the " greatest cause which, in ancient 
or modern times, has been pleaded at the bar of the 
moral judgment of mankind." 

Recalling the anti-slavery crusade, Mr. Beecher 
once described as the " greatest work of the 
modern century, the emancipation of the slaves 
in America, by which the industry of the Continent 
was also emancipated, and by which the Church 
and Religion itself were saved from a worse 
than Babylonian captivity." In truth, those years 
of stormy agitation, in which he took a most 
conspicuous part, removed the chief danger to the 
American nationality, solidified free institutions, 
kindled a new faith in God's overruling providence, 
enlarged the mental horizon of the New World, lifted 
the American Republic out of many prejudices and 
provincialisms, created American literature, raised 
the moral tone of the masses, brought America into 
active sympathy with the best thought of the Old 
World, liberated a race, and began their preparation 
for the redemption of the African Continent. 

There is no equipment for the never-ending work 
of reform more needful than the vivid sense of indi- 
vidual responsibility which ought to be felt by every 
citizen of a free commonwealth. As Mr. Beecher 
said: "Each individual citizen is responsible to the 
degree of influence which he has, and if he does not 



CALL TO BROOKLYN. EARLY REVIVALS. II5 

exert it he is responsible for a neglect of duty — a 
binding duty. He is bound to create a public senti- 
ment that shall work for virtue. He is bound to 
drain the community of all those evils that run 
together and form a channel for vice and crime." ^ 

Mr. Beecher's enormous vitality, his immense 
and self-rectifying common sense, his wide sym- 
pathies with men of all classes, his indomitable 
energy and unflinching courage, his piercing wit 
and abounding humor, these were elements of 
power continually augmenting for more than thirty 
years, which fitted him marvelously well for the 
life of reformatory activity into which he had 
already entered. When we unite with these elements, 
as Dr. Richard S. Storrs said at the Plymouth Church 
Silver Wedding, " a somewhat vehement and combat- 
ive nature, that always gets quickened and fired by 
opposition, as you have found, and that never is so 
self-possessed, so serene, and so victorious, as when 
the clamor is loudest around him and the fight is 
fiercest — and if you add very fixed and positive ideas 
on all the great ethical, social, and public questions of 
the time — there you have the champion reform-fighter 
of the last twenty-five years." ^ 

It was most fortunate that Mr. Beecher was able 
to yoke with him in his great life-work such a sym- 
pathetic and mighty auxiliary force as Plymouth 
Church, under his ministry, became. In reviewing 
twenty-five years of their history together he said : 
" It has always been my faith and feeling that the 



^" Biography," p. 2ig. 

^ " Plymouth Church Silver Wedding," pp. 80-81. 



Il6 HENRY WARD BEECHER, 

great objects contemplated by the Gospel of Christ 
would fail of accomplishment if they were left chiefly 
to the hands of a professional clergy ; that there 
never would be the work done that was necessary till 
the whole body of Christians became, as it were, min- 
isters of Christ. And among the earliest things I had 
in my mind and heart when I first came was, May 
it please God to gather together here a body of 
Christian men and women who shall be, each in 
his several place, not simply a witness to the grace 
of God in his own heart, but a worker together with 
me in the dissemination of the Gospel. This desire 
has been answered ; and there has been, for the last 
twenty-five years, in connection with Plymouth 
Church, a large and increasing band of devoted men 
and women. A more zealous or active body I have 
never known." 

The Audience-room in which Mr. Beecher began 
his preaching in Brooklyn was rapidly filled to over- 
flowing, and revivals of great power, accompanied 
by daily morning prayer-meetings, refreshed and 
strengthened the Church, so that in two years the 
membership had risen to over four hundred, more 
than one hundred and fifty uniting with the Church 
in the year 1848. Mr. Beecher to a degree equaled 
by few men in any generation, was filled with zeal 
for the conversion of men to Christ, and for their 
edification in Christian living. In him was a large 
measure of the Pauline spirit which led his father to 
say, that " the greatest thing in the world is to save 
souls." 



CHAPTER XII. 

A HISTORIC CHURCH. 

Mr. Beecher was early thrust into the highest 
conspicuousness as a cliampion of liberty by a 
remarkable scene in which he appeared as a slave- 
auctioneer in 1848. The case of the Edmonson 
sisters drew the attention of the whole country. 
Their mother was a slave, and, after they had grown 
to womanhood, their mother's owner determined to 
send them from the City of Washington, where they 
had been living, down to New Orleans, where their 
beauty and attractiveness would bring him a large sum 
in the market. The girls made a desperate attempt to 
escape aboard the Pearl schooner ; but the ship was 
taken and their pitiable story became known at the 
North. The heart-broken father, a free colored man, 
had gone to New York to raise the exorbitant sum 
which the owner demanded. " The old man was 
finally advised to go to Henry Ward Beecher and ask 
his aid. He made his way to the door of the great 
Brooklyn preacher's house, but, overcome by many 
disappointments and fearing to meet with another 
rebuff, hesitated to ring the bell, and sat down on 
the steps with tears streaming from his eyes."^ 

Mr. Beecher having heard his story, offered to do 
what he could. 



1 «« 



The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe," p. 179. 



Il8 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

With Others he spoke at a great meeting, held in 
the Broadway Tabernacle in New York, where the 
sum of two thousand two hundred dollars was raised 
by which the captives were set free. Probably in all 
his life he never delivered a more effective speech 
than that spoken on this occasion on which he made 
an impassioned appeal for the sisters in bondage ; 
" He extemporized there on the stage the auction of 
a Christian slave. The enumeration of his qualities 
by the auctioneer, and the bids that followed were 
given by the speaker in perfect character. He made 
the scene as realistic as one of Hogarth's pictures 
and as lurid as a Rembrandt." ^ 

He described the qualities and excellencies, intel- 
lectual, moral, and spiritual, of the human chattel. 
** And more than all that, gentlemen, they say he is 
one of those praying Methodist niggers ; who bids? 
A thousand-'fifteen hundred— two thousand— twenty- 
five hundred ? Going, going ! The last call ? Gone ! " 
It is said that the excitement which followed was 
frenzied and the money required flowed in like . 
stream ; and Mr. Beecher thought that of all the 
meetings he ever attended none surpassed this '' for 
a panic of sympathy." 

Mrs. Stowe became personally responsible for the 
education of these liberated girls. In 1852 their old 
mother came North in order to rescue two other of 
her children from the slave-trader's clutches, and 
through the efforts of Mrs. Stowe a sufficient amount 
of money was raised for the liberation of the children 
and of the mother too. Such were some of the 



* •' Biography," pp. 292-293. 



A HISTORIC CHURCH. II9 

excitements and moral agitations which marked the 
beginning of Mn Beecher's Eastern ministry. He 
had the enthusiastic sympathy of his people from 
the start, and their almost complete identification 
with the convictions and purposes of their pastor 
made them a force which vastly extended his influence. 

Reviewing the beginnings of his own ministry in 
Brooklyn, he said : " I had a very strong impression 
on my mind that the first five years in the life of a 
Church would determine the history of that Church, 
and give to it its position and genius ; that if the 
earliest years of a Church were controversial or 
barren, it would take scores of years to right it ; but 
that if a Church were consecrated and active and 
energetic during the first five years of its life, it 
would probably go on for generations developing the 
same features. I went into this work with all my 
soul, preaching night and day, visiting incessantly, 
and developing, as fast and far as might be, that social, 
contagious spirit which we call a revival of religion." 
The history of Plymouth Church became one of 
great and frequent revivals, and, though the spiritual 
life was interrupted in part by great national excite- 
ments, there continued to be for many years not only 
a remarkable growth in numbers but also "a steady 
increase in the ratio of awakenings and conversions," 
and the pastor could say in 1872, " The last five years 
have been more fruitful than any equal period in our 
history." Among the most faithful and steadfast 
members were some who entered the Church during 
the first few months of his ministry. 

The old church building was fortunately destroyed 
by fire, January 13, 1849. A large temporary taber- 



I20 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

nacle was soon built upon ground on Pierrepont 
street, offered to the society by that liberal-handed 
Christian and staunch friend of the slave, Mr. Lewis 
Tappan. A new and much larger structure was soon 
planned, and the corner-stone was laid on May 29, 
1849. The new Plymouth Church with its Lecture- 
room and Sunday-school consisted of two buildings 
under a single roof and reached from Orange street 
through to Pineapple street. This building, the his- 
toric structure which now stands, was first used by 
the congregation on the opening Sunday of the year 
1850. 

Mr. Gladstone has said that the progress of civili- 
zation during the first fifty years of the nineteenth 
century probably surpassed the progress made in all 
the preceding ages, and that the progress of the next 
twenty-five years even outran the advancement 
achieved during the preceding fifty. With the open- 
ing of the new Plymouth Church in the closing year 
of the first half of the nineteenth century, a mighty 
moral force was made ready for the giant and swift 
victories of the coming age. For nearly forty years 
the voice that was heard within its walls carried mes- 
sages of truth and inspiration to the ends of the civil- 
ized world. " Then began," it has been said, " that 
sound, once heard, never forgotten, and heard 
nowhere else so continuously, of the incoming multi- 
tude, the tread of liurrying feet like the sound of 
many waters, as the crowd, held back for a time until 
pew-holders have been in part accommodated, press in 
and take their places." * 



* " Biography," p, 225, 



A HISTORIC CHURCH. 121 

Drawn by gratitude, curiosity, admiration, they 
came from North and South, from the far East and the 
farther West, men, women, youth, children, of all con- 
victions and conditions. From other lands they came 
year after year, with the preacher's widening fame, 
and it is probable that, except Westminster Abbey, 
no other Church of English-speaking nations has in 
this century been visited by so many men and women 
of renown. 

The congregation which Mr. Beecher gradually 
drew about him was quite as representatively Ameri- 
can as that gathered by any other pulpit orator in the 
United States. Besides the children of the Pilgrims 
and Puritans, the distinctively New England and 
Congregational elements, there were many from 
Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, and other Protestant 
Churches, and not a few Catholics were friendly to 
the great-hearted Christian in Plymouth pulpit. 
There were in the congregation quite a number of 
eminent merchants and other business men of wide 
repute and success, some of them benevolent builders 
of colleges and libraries and large givers to missions, 
charities, and all other good works. The Church 
grew in the amount of its benevolent giving, not, of 
course, to the immense proportions of some of the 
wealthier congregations of New York, Boston, and 
Chicago, but still to such an extent that the pastor 
and people of Plymouth Church were beset by the 
eager and hungry solicitations of all kinds of holy 
beggars. 

Mr. Beecher attracted to him great numbers of the 
younger business men of New York and Brooklyn, 
and in his congregation were found many college 



122 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

graduates, school-teachers, lawyers, and physicians of 
reputation and scores of theological students. What 
may be called the great middle section of American 
society was thoroughly at home in Plymouth Church 
— the people who furnish the best materials for 
Christian propagandism and manifest the greatest 
fidelity to Christian duties. While Plymouth Church 
cared abundantly for the poor through its amply 
equipped Missions, the great body of its people were 
not from families oppressed with want or living on 
the narrowest competence. Though not numbering 
so large a percentage of the very rich as some of the 
other Churches of Brooklyn and New York, the intel- 
lectual and social rank of Plymouth Church was 
notably far higher than that, for example, of Mr. 
Spurgeon's great congregation in the Metropolitan 
Tabernacle. Plymouth Church naturally became 
assimilated to the character and spiri.t of its large- 
minded, democratic, and earnest-hearted pastor. It 
was to a very unusual degree a congregation of men. 
But it was more than a congregation, held together 
by the magnetism of a great orator, — it was and is a 
Church of Jesus Christ, a brotherhood of believers in 
the Son of God, still doing, under its new leaders, 
Dr. Lyman Abbott and his associates, a very large 
Christian work in the changed conditions of a " down- 
town " Church. 

During the greater years of Mr. Beecher's ministry, 
it would be hard to exaggerate the influence wielded 
by this large and effective organization of earnest, 
believing men and women. The membership of the 
Sunday-schools came to number three thousand; the 
membership of the Church was at one time more than 



A HISTORIC CHURCH. 123 

three thousand, while the entire population that 
looked to Plymouth Church as in some sense its 
spiritual head, numbered at one time not less than 
twelve thousand. 

It was natural, from the relation of Plymouth 
Church and its pastor to great national events in the 
anti-slavery times and in the years of the Civil War, 
that there should be an unusual development of 
strong patriotic feeling in this famous congregation. 
The patriotism was not of any cheap or Fourth-of- 
July order, but was rather that deeper and purer love 
of the country and its flag which springs from a 
regard for liberty, justice, equality, and the higher 
elements of a Christian civilization. It was that love 
of country which is now so widely taught and 
inspired in our public schools, Sunday-schools, and 
Churches, and which has had such apt, forcible, and 
frequent expression in the addresses of Benjamin 
Harrison. In this development, as in other things, 
Plymouth Church was a noble pioneer, although a 
similar spirit burned in other Churches of the North. 

Mr. Beecher always realized and often said that his 
congregation w^as not a mere temperance nor anti- 
slavery society, held together by a human leader. It 
was a thoroughly vitalized Christian Church, carry- 
ing on the same work which is done by other 
Churches, inspired, however, with new convictions 
with regard to the application of truth to the problems 
and perils of social and political life. In the years 
when the Church w^as most active in the anti-slavery 
trouble the sermons on slavery were comparatively 
infrequent. " My impression is," said Mr. Beecher, 
*' that not, perhaps, more than once or twice in a year 



124 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

was the subject of slavery made a matter of discourse; 
and that, perhaps with the exception of one or two 
periods of the year, the teaching and conversation of 
the Church turned upon the deeper themes of per- 
sonal experience, and upon religion as it exists and is 
talked about in all our Christian bodies." ^ 

Although living in tumultuous and stormy times 
Plymouth Church manifested an unusual degree of 
concord and fellowship, and the pastor attributed this 
union of spirit, in a Church where the largest liberty 
of opinion and of utterance was encouraged, to the 
effect of the exaltation of Divine love, the prominence 
given to the teaching of Christ. Whatever defects 
may be charged to it as an organization, and it was 
made up of fallible men and women, it should be 
remembered to the credit of Plymouth Church that 
it furnished the greatest of modern preachers the 
necessary medium of his chief contribution to the life 
of his own age and after generations. It was the 
object of his most prayerful solicitude and deepest 
love, and it should be recorded, not only to its renown 
but to the credit of human nature, that this Church 
stood as a wall of loving hearts around its trusted 
leader in the dark times of his awful agony and trial. 

Scores of thousands now living cherish sacred 
memories of the building which housed this congre- 
gation, that plain structure, quite in contrast with 
the ornate and stately churches which America is 
now building, and with the statelier cathedrals of 
world-wide celebrity which give such beautiful dig- 
nity to the towns and cities of old England. The 



* *' Plymouth Church Silver Wedding," p. 64. 



A HISTORIC CHURCH. 12$ 

congregation worshiped in a building of exceeding 
plainness, almost barren of every ornamentation 
except that given by the majestic organ and the 
flower-decked pulpit platform. They expended large 
sums to beautify the mission schools, intended for 
the use of the poor, thus giving them a far better 
external equipment than they ever bestowed on them- 
selves, but Plymouth Church though plain enough to 
satisfy the strictest Puritan was yet thoroughly 
adapted to the great purpose of preaching and hear- 
ing the Gospel. As an audience-room it was warmly 
praised by Charles Dickens and many others. The 
preacher's form and movements were not hidden 
behind a pulpit rampart and his vitality was not lost 
before it reached the first pew. The galleries were 
deep ; the pews swept in a circle about the platform; 
the large volunteer choir and the great organ were 
back of the preacher ; there was no broad central 
aisle to stare like an empty lane in the speaker's face. 
A sanctified good sense brought the speaker close to 
his hearers and quadrupled his effectiveness. Not only 
Henry Ward Beecher, but the matchless Abolition 
orator, Wendell Phillips, and scores of eminent men 
besides, found in Plymouth Church the opportunity 
for bringing their convictions to bear on the social 
and political life of their times. In the years of the 
War, the voice which spoke to eager throngs within 
its plain, white walls, reached the camp of the soldier 
on the Potomac and on the Tennessee and was heard 
from the coast of Maine to the Pacific shores. In a 
large measure it brought courage and gave direction 
to President, Cabinet, and Congress in many a critical 
hour of that momentous struggle. 



126 HENRY WARD BEECKER. 

The seating capacity of Plymouth Church, which 
was originally a little over two thousand, was aug- 
mented in 1857 by placing folding seats in the aisles, 
and by subsequent devices nearly three thousand 
people were accommodated with sitting or standing- 
room. Not infrequently in the evening as many 
were turned away as could enter. In 1850 it was an 
act of great faith to build anything so spacious as 
this structure for a youthful Church, but if, from the 
breaking out of the Civil War to the close of his 
life, Mr. Beecher had been accommodated with a far 
more spacious tabernacle in a more convenient and 
desirable location, he would easily have addressed 
audiences equal in number to those of Mr. Spurgeon, 
Canon Liddon, or Dr. Talmage. From 1858 to 1861 
plans were formed and nearly consummated for build- 
ing, in a new location, a much larger and more 
imposing structure, to cost about two hundred 
thousand dollars. But, owing to a variety of compli- 
cations, the scheme was finally abandoned. 

There are multitudes, not living in Brooklyn, who 
to-day think of Plymouth Church as the dearest and 
most cherished place that is haunted by their grate- 
ful memories. They can never forget the happy and 
homelike feeling with which they there sat in the 
company of eager and expectant worshipers. The 
white walls are dear to them from their very plain- 
ness. The great organ looms before their imagination 
as a magic storehouse of slumbering musical thunders 
or of flute-like and sweet-toned harmonies, awaiting 
the touch of the sympathetic master. They see the 
beaming face, in later years adorned with long white 
locks, of him to whom every eye is eagerly turned as 



A HISTORIC CHURCH. I27 

he ascends the platform, and, sometimes with an 
almost transfigured look, gazes over the inspiring 
throng. They still hear the echoes of the grand 
hymns in which pastor and congregation, choir and 
organ, all united until it seemed almost as if they 
were standing in the general assembly and Church of 
the First-born. They remember the hush which fell 
over the congregation as Mr. Beecher rose, and in 
quietest tones asked the Father's blessing. " Because 
Thou art good, and because Thou hast called unto 
our souls we have come to appear in Zion and before 
God. Now, what wait we for ? Open Thine arms 
for us. Give forth from Thine heart that inspiration 
which shall make everything in us rise up and 
acknowledge our filial relation. With all our hearts 
and souls may we be able to call Thee our Father, 
and, this day, to rejoice somewhat in the contempla- 
tion of that realm of righteousness and wealth of joy 
which Thou hast for Thine Own Self, and for all that 
are heirs through Jesus Christ of Thy great salva- 
tion." ' 

They recall their gladness as he opened unto them 
the Scriptures, often making the hard places easy, 
and the dark places bright by his swift interpretative 
comment. They still hear those strangely sympathetic 
tones of voice with which he read many of the words 
of Moses or of Isaiah, of Paul or of the Divine Teacher. 
And then what a revelation of God's nearness and 
sympathy with men, what a sweet disclosure of the 
divineness of life came to the hushed thousands as 
Mr. Beecher uttered his memorable prayers, *' sunning 



Book of Prayer," p. 8g. 



128 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

his thoughts and feelings in the light of God's face.** 
Multitudes still feel that they have never elsewhere 
been so near to Heaven as w^hen this servant of Christ 
was talking with the Lord and carrying the sorrows 
and troubles and perplexities of his people to the 
heart of the Father in Heaven. 

Who can forget his prayers of thanksgiving? 
" And now our Father what can we say to Thee ? 
What utterances of thanks can seem other than 
foolish by the side of such mercy ? " " We are 
surrounded by the memorials and memories and 
testimonies of Thy goodness to us." " We desire, 
O God, no other service. Thy law is holy and 
just and good, and Thy service with its yoke 
and burden is more truly liberty and lightness 
than the freest service of the world and its sin. Then 
only do we feel ourselves without care when we are 
most entirely surrendered to the spirit and will of 
our Father in Heaven, when we feel that our life is 
flowing with Thine, that we are a part of the great 
scheme of redemption, that we are being borne in 
the bosom of the Church of Christ, that we are of 
them that are to be registered in Heaven." 

And then how often they have felt it easier to bear 
burdens, as they entered into sympathy with him who 
prayed : " May w^e rejoice to suffer with Christ. May 
we esteem it more than all the treasures of Egypt. 
And, Lord Jesus, make us worthy to suffer for Thee, 
and make us worthy to have our names cast out for 
righteousness' sake." " O Thou Father, find Thy 
children to-day, and speak peaceable words to them. 
Comfort any that mourn over sin, and may their 
mourning do them good. Speak forgiveness to any 



A HISTORIC CHURCH. I29 

that scarcely dare to look into Thy face, and may they 
glance there to behold it, not as the darkness of life 
but as the glow of morning, full of hope and promise." 

And how often their hearts were inspired with new 
courage for national conflicts ! ''Grant that in this 
great nation there may be none that will shrink from 
duty, none that shall fear to speak and act for truth 
and for liberty, none that shall retreat in the day of 
conflict, or stand indifferent, when Heaven and earth 
are commingled." And how tenderly he prayed for 
the whole world, over which his loving thoughts 
seemed to spread like the sunrise ! " O bring this 
world at last to the bosom of Christ, and there may 
it find that anchorage. and peace which it has so long 
sought in vain in its course." ^ 

They will not forget his prayers for the Church 
universal : " May Thy people vex each other less and 
less, distrust less and less, separate themselves less 
and less. Pour out Thy spirit upon all those things 
that are bringing Thy servants of every name together, 
and grant that this bond of a common love may grow 
stronger and stronger around the earth." How ten- 
derly he prayed for himself and all tempted ones ! 
" Ours is yet the warfare, we yet are in bodies that 
require our severest government ; we are attempting 
to bring every thought and feeling in subjection to 
Jesus Christ's law ; we are wrestling with pride that 
refuses coercion and watching selfishness that presses 
like a flood." 

And how constantly through his prayers he brought 

them into sympathy with God, revealing the divine 

sympathy to them, and how he pictured, as if he saw 

it, the company of the redeemed in glory ! " Thou 

9 



130 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

art gathering there multitudes which no man can 
number. From every age Thou hast garnered there; 
for us there is this hope and this joyful anticipation. 
We beseech of Thee that we may be able to live this 
life in the body with a constant faith of the great 
life of the Spirit; that we may never be discouraged 
nor beaten down; that we may know that we are the 
King's sons ; though exiled, in disguise and poverty, 
and even cast into shame, may we remember our 
birthright, the pleasure that awaits us, the crown, the 
throne, the scepter, the glory of immortal and per- 
petual youth where Thou art. When the former 
things shall have passed away, when sorrow and dying 

shall have fled, when Thou shalt have wiped the tear 

» 

from every eye, and when Thou dost comfort us even 
as a father comforts his child, then, in that blessed 
land where Thou dwellest, what will be the memory 
of the trouble that we have had on earth! " ^ 

And who will ever forget, who knew it in its golden 
and wondrous prime, the varied and matchless pow- 
ers of that eloquence of preaching which swept with 
angelic strength and splendor over the wiiole domain 
of human experience, and touched every chord of 
memory and hope, of reason and imagination, of 
playfulness and indignant passion, of self-sacrifice 
and of sympathy ? It seemed at times as if all the 
powers of the great organ had been concentrated 
into a living man, through whom spake the living 
God, now uttering his voice in homelike familiarity, 
and then with the trumpet's most piercing and pas- 
sionate notes, now with the plaintiveness of a child's 



* •' Prayers from Plymouth Pulpit." " A Book of Prayer." 



A HISTORIC CHURCH. I3I 

pleading cry and anon with a Miitonic sweep and 
grandeur of sound, like the thunderous music of the 
ocean shore. 

What he himself has written in describing the 
prince of musical instruments, the organ, is an apt 
illustration of his own preaching at the highest. 
" The organ means majesty; it means grandeur. It 
means sweetness, to be sure, but it is sweetness in 
power. Whatever it has of sweetness, of fineness, or 
of delicacy, there is, moreover, an under-power that 
is like the sea itself. Running through all the various 
qualities of tone, as soft and as sweet as the song- 
sparrow (which is the sweetest bird that sings), and 
in its complexity rising through all gradations, imi- 
tating almost everything that is known of sounds on 
earth, it expresses at last the very thunder and the 
earthquake, and almost the final trumpet itself." 

A study of Mr. Beecher's preaching must take a 
special chapter, but there are many who will value an 
attempt to record, even in the briefest way, some of 
the impressions which live in the memories of those 
who were wont to find in Plymouth Church a spiritual 
home, and in Henry Ward Beecher a prophet of God 
who thrilled them into a glad consciousness of their 
divinest possibilities. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE PRIVATE AND PEACEFUL MINISTRY. 

In order to secure any very vivid and adequately 
full impression of a life so unusually abundant in 
vitality and varied in effort, the student of Mr. 
Beecher will do well to fix his attention for a time 
on what may be called the more private and peaceful 
ministry of this great preacher and reformer ; on the 
incidents of his home life ; on the training and growth 
of his Church, and on the studies and experiences by 
which his nature was enriched, before he follows 
him into the great and stormy arena of national 
debate and strife. The word growth explains Mr. 
Beecher's personality and achievements almost as 
much as the word genius. The man of thirty-four 
who began his ministry in Brooklyn and made but a 
poor showing before his theological examiners at the 
time of his installation, is an intellectual stripling and 
tyro compared with the long-trained, experienced, 
and masterful man of fifty-nine, who instructed, 
delighted, and electrified famous theological profes- 
sors and hundreds of Christian ministers in his " Yale 
Lectures on Preaching." 

Mr. Beecher's education was largely along the lines 
of his daily work. His heart was sweetened and 
made still more sympathetic by domestic sorrow 



THE PRIVATE AND PEACEFUL MINISTRY. 1 33 

in the first year of the Plymouth pastorate. By the 
death of his little girl (Caty) shortly after the 
Beechers came to Brooklyn, he was taught anew 
divine ministry of grief, and the hearts of pastor 
and people were wedded into a closer unity of feel- 
ing. "I was held up," he says, "by increasing love 
and sympathy on every side. Of this world I had 
more than heart could wish ; of friends, never so 
many or so worth having ; and the effect, as might 
be supposed, has answered to the cause. I find now 
that it is with me as with mountains in spring time — 
every fissure is growing to a rill, every patch of soil 
is starting its flowers, every shrub has its insect and 
every tree its bird." * 

In order to minister to the ever-increasing wants 
of Plymouth Church Mr. Beecher needed to be a man 
of wide and incessant industry. The malign proph- 
ecy that he would hold out only six months might 
possibly have been a true one had he not continually, 
in his own way, fed the sources of his intellectual 
and spiritual productiveness. Some one has said 
that genius burns, but it needs fuel to keep it burn- 
ing. John Bright regarded it as a great and almost 
an unparalleled mental feat that any man, however 
resourceful, should make two successful addresses 
to the same congregation every week. Mr. Beecher not 
only did this for the period of nearly forty years, 
but added also a week-night lecture usually spoken 
of as a Lecture-room Talk, and some of the richest 
and most valuable practical suggestions which he has 
left were given at these familiar meetings. 



Biography," p. 224. 



■ 134 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

The attendance at these Friday-night gatherings of 
his people was usually very large, reaching some- 
times seven or eight hundred. The exercises were 
lacking in the formality, stiffness, and solemnity which 
formerly characterized almost all American prayer- 
meetings. Mr. Beecher contrived to come into closer 
relations with his people than many pastors have 
been able to do, and than vv^as possible to him from 
the pulpit. Although he usually did almost all the 
speaking, he elicited by skillful questions pertinent 
and valuable remarks from others, was patient even 
with bores, and often succeeded in shutting them off, 
and secured a large degree of liberty and a pervading 
home feeling on the part of the congregation. The 
American historian, James Parton, has given vivid 
pictures of Mr. Beecher in his lecture-room, a room 
high and brilliantly lighted, full of cheerful company 
" not one of whom seemed to have on more or richer 
clothes than she had the moral strength to wear." 
** No pulpit, or anything like a pulpit, casts a shadow 
over the scene; but in its stead there was rather a 
large platform, raised two steps, covered with dark 
green canvas, and having upon it a very small table 
and one chair." " At one side of the platform but on 
the floor of the room, among the settees, there was a 
piano open. Mr. Beecher sat near by, reading what 
appeared to be a letter of three or four sheets." The 
whole scene was so ''informal, unstudied, and social " 
that in reporting it Mr. Parton felt as if he were 
" reporting for print the conversation of a private 
evening party." Mr. Beecher gave out a hymn by 
the number in a low tone of voice, the piano led the 
singing, which was joyous and unanimous. The pastor 



THE PRIVATE AND PEACEFUL MINISTRY. I35 

in a low tone pronounced the name of one of the 
brethren who led in prayer; several prayers, brief and 
simple, alternated with the singing. " The meeting 
ran along in the most spontaneous and pleasant man- 
ner; and, with all his heartiness and simplicity, there 
was a certain refined decorum pervading all that was 
done and said. There was a pause after the last hymn 
died away, and then Mr. Beecher, still seated, began, 
in the tone of conversation, to speak." What Mr. 
Beecher said at meetings like this has largely been 
gathered up and published. Many of his wise words 
at these informal meetings are yet to be given to the 
world. 

Christians who have been trained to value a prayer- 
meeting by the number and fervor of the prayers 
offered, were not always satisfied with the happy, easy, 
and conversational tone and the apparent lack of 
wrestling earnestness manifested in these meetings. 
More time was given to singing than to prayer, and 
this feature of his meetings he justified in these words 
from his '' Lectures on Preaching ": '' In the prayer- 
meeting music ought to be a grand substratum. 
They are called prayer-meetings, but two prayers are 
often enough for a meeting — about two prayers to six 
hymns. Why ? Because out of every six people that 
pray, there are not two that can pray as a hymn can. 
It is not probable that you will find one person in an 
average congregation of two hundred that can express 
so admirably, with such subtle lines, the dealing of 
God with men, as Cowper did. It is not once in a 
hundred times that a man can preach so much sound 
Gospel in verse as old John Newton did. You have 
very few men like Wesley and Watts, who are the 



136 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

two wings of hymnody. These two men soar as few 
can soar. We might say, 

" Descend, immortal dove ; 
Take us upon thy wings. 

When these men are invoked, they take the whole 
congregation on their wings and lift them up." The 
more Mr. Beecher's methods are studied, the more it 
is seen that he was a skillful fisher of men, a care- 
ful and keen-eyed student of the motives by which 
human hearts are stirred, and the results achieved by 
him amply vindicate his general wisdom. In saying 
this it is not intimated that his methods were the 
best in their adaptation to all kinds of people. 

The Friday evening meetings, as Dr. Lyman Abbott 
has suggested, furnished Mr. Beecher his " pastoral 
opportunity." " Mr. Beecher never does any house- 
to-house visitation; and now he rarely conducts a 
funeral or calls upon those in sorrow. But he never- 
theless does a considerable amount of pastoral work. 
At the close of his Friday-evening meeting he holds 
what I may call a religious reception. For sometimes 
half an hour after the regular service is closed, he 
sits on the platform to receive, hear, suggest, counsel, 
direct. He shakes hands with any one who offers him 
a hand. No name escapes him. A friend returned 
after a long absence is instantly recognized and 
greeted with the warm cordiality of a love that is 
without dissimulation." ^ 

Many persons now living will remember the scenes 
in the lecture-room on the Friday evenings before the 
Communion of the Lord's Supper was to be cele- 



* " Life of Beecher," pp. 274-^275. 



THE PRIVATE AND PEACEFUL MINISTRY. I37 

brated, when Mr. Beecher with his deacons examined 
the candidates for admission into the Church. A 
theological student from the Union Seminary, New 
York, and his brother, who was also a student in the 
same seminary, presented their letters on one eve- 
ning. The letters were in the usual form, but they were 
surprised to have Mr. Beecher go back of the letters 
and inquire somewhat into their personal experience 
and habits. He even asked them what position they 
took with regard to the use of intoxicating drinks. 
They both replied that they were total abstainers, and 
Mr. Beecher was glad of the answer. Mr. D wight L. 
Moody, then almost unknown to fame, was a listener 
at the examination, and he said: " Mr. Beecher, what 
would you have done, had these young men given you 
a different reply?" Mr. Beecher said: "I should 
have put them off for awhile and counseled with them, 
hoping to bring them to right views." 

He purposed making his Church a socially demo- 
cratic and happy congregation, realizing if possible 
the ideal of a great Christian household. The social 
meetings which in the early years of Plymouth 
Church were a marked feature of its life, and at which 
he was accustomed to speak for ten minutes or so, in 
his attractive, humorous, and kindly way, doubtless 
helped to mold the Plymouth congregation into its 
remarkable unity of spirit, although after a time he 
deemed it wiser to let his people choose by natural 
affiliation their own familiar companionships. He 
believed that the brotherly spirit pervading a con- 
gregation was essential to those higher manifesta- 
tions of spiritual interest and vitality for which he 
prayed and labored. Revivals sprang up and con- 



138 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

tinued, sometimes for years. "Probably the most 
sacred season in the history of this room (the lecture- 
room) was the season of 1857 and 1858. I well 
remember the stormy, the snowy Monday morning in 
February when a few of us, twenty-eight in number, 
I think, met for a first morning prayer-meeting. 
Religious interest had been deepening throughout 
the country, it had been deepening in Plymouth 
Church; but to all requests to appoint a protracted 
meeting, Mr. Beecher had but one reply. He disa- 
vowed his belief in *got-up' revivals, saying that if 
the spirit of revival was in the Church the revival 
itself would follow. For two weeks this morning 
meeting was continued, without Mr. Beecher's pres- 
ence. To some he even seemed to discourage the 
work by refusing to participate in it, but his purpose 
was to 'put the responsibility upon his people, and he 
achieved his object. Reluctantly but gradually they 
took it, the meetings steadily increased in size and 
interest; and at last, at the close of a Sabbath evening 
inquiry meeting, he announced his purpose to be 
present at the next morning prayer-meeting. This 
was March nth, and from that day until July 3d, 
those morning meetings were kept up I believe with- 
out a break, and almost without a single absence of 
the pastor. They who attended these meetings will 
never forget them; their freedom of intercourse, their 
social warmth, their spiritual tenderness."^ 

In July, 1850, he made his first voyage to England. 
His strong constitution had been somewhat weakened 
by frequent attacks of sickness. During his absence 



* " Life of Beecher," pp. 273-274. 



THE PRIVATE AND PEACEFUL MINISTRY. 139 

the pulpit of Plymouth Church was supplied by his 
brother Rev. Charles Beecher. Henry Ward landed 
at Liverpool on July 30, 1850, and a new and import- 
ant development of his large and impressible nature 
was then begun. The sea had not been agreeable to 
this poor sailor, but Old England filled him with 
delight. Few Americans have ever visited the Old 
Home with so intense an appreciation of many aspects 
of English life and scenery His note-books record 
in briefest fashion his observations of English hedges, 
of railroad mile-posts, of the peculiarities of railway 
construction, of the facts regarding the manufacture of 
plated-ware in Birmingham, and of many other things 
which filled his memory with materials for illustra- 
tion. In his " Yale Lectures on Preaching" he said: 
"When I was in Birmingham, I went in to see how 
they manufacture papier-mache^ and I saw the vast 
machinery and the various methods by which it was 
blocked out and made. I watched the various proc- 
esses from room to room until I came to the last, 
where is given the finishing touch, for final polish. 
They told me they had tried everything in the world 
for polishing, and at last had been convinced that 
there was nothing like the human hand. There was 
no leather or other substance that they could get hold 
of, that had such power to polish to the very finest 
smoothness, as this living leather in its vital state — 
the human hand. It is very much so with people. 
You can teach them from the pulpit in certain large 
ways, but there are some things you cannot do except 
by putting your very hand on them and working them 
down."^ 



Yale Lectures on Preaching," Second Series, p. 184. 



I40 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Not only was his memory stored with facts through 
observation, but he found in England that which fired 
his imagination, as for example Warwick Castle. " I 
was wafted backward and backward, until I stood on 
the foundations upon which Old England herself was 
builded, when as yet there was none of her. There, 
far back of all literature, before the English tongue 
itself was formed, earlier than her jurisprudence and 
than all modern civilization, I stood in imagination, 
and, reversing my vision, looked down into a far 
future to search for the men and deeds which had 
been, as if they were yet to be; thus making a proph- 
ecy of history, and changing memory into a dreamy 
foresight. . . . Against these stones on which I 
lay my hand have rung the sounds of battle. Yonder 
on these very grounds, there raged, in sight of men 
who stand where I do, fiercest and deadliest conflicts. 
All this ground is fed on blood." ^ 

At Stratford-on-Avon, the birthplace and home of 
Shakespeare, Mr, Beecher put up at the Red Horse 
Inn, and while there he passed some of the transfig- 
ured moments of his life. He attended Church here, 
in the building where Shakespeare lies buried, and 
the service, in the forms which had been dear to his 
mother's heart, made a wonderful impression on his 
sensitive mind. ''I had never heard any part of the 
supplication, a direct prayer, chanted by a choir, and 
it seemed as though I heard not with my ear but 
with my soul. I was dissolved, my whole being 
seemed to be like an incense wafted gratefully toward 
God. The Divine Presence rose before me in won- 
drous majesty, but of ineffable gentleness and good- 

^ " Slar Papers," pp. 20-21. 



THE PRIVATE AND PEACEFUL MINISTRY. 141 

ness, and I could not stay away from more familiar 
approach, but seemed irresistibly but gently drawn 
toward God. My soul, then thou didst magnify the 
Lord, and rejoice in the God of thy salvation ! And 
then came to my mind the many exultations of the 
Psalms of David, and never before were the expres- 
sions and figures so noble and so necessary to express 
what I felt. I had risen, it seemed to me, so high as 
to be where David was when his soul conceived the 
things which he wrote. . . . O ! when in the 
prayers, breathed forth in strains of sweet, simple, 
solemn music, the love of Christ was recognized, 
how I longed then to give utterance to what that love 
seemed to me. There was a moment in which the 
Heavens seemed open to me and I saw the glory 
of God ! All the earth seemed to me a storehouse 
of images, made to set forth the Redeemer, and I 
could scarcely be stilled from crying out. . . . 
For the first time in my life I went forward to com- 
mune in the Episcopal Church. Without any intent 
of my own, but because from my seat it was nearest, 
I knelt down at the altar, with the dust of Shake- 
speare beneath my feet. I thought of it as I thought 
of ten thousand other things, without the least 
disturbance of devotion. It seemed as if I stood 
upon a place so high that, like one looking over a 
wide valley, all objects conspired to make but one 
view. I thought of the General Assembly and Church 
of the First Born, of my mother and brother and 
children in Heaven, of my living family on earth, of 
you, of the whole Church entrusted to my hands — 
they afar off, I upon the banks of the Avon." ^ 

^ " Star Papers," pp. 30-31. 



142 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Oxford, noblest built of English towns, with its 

" Seclusions ivy-hushed, and pavements sweet 
With immemorial lisp of musing feet " 

impressed him as it does all sensitive minds. He 
walked with solemn reverence among the alcoves 
and through the halls of the Bodleian Library " as if 
in a pyramid of embalmed souls." Arrived in Lon- 
don, he had the usual feelings which come to natures 
like his, workers in behalf of their fellow men, when 
visiting the scenes of historic renown, a sense of 
insufficiency for his own life's work. *' I have every- 
where in my traveling — at the shrine of the martyrs 
in Oxford, at the graves of Bunyan and Wesley in 
London, at the vault in which Raleigh was for twelve 
years confined in the Tower — asked myself whether 
I could have done and endured what they did, and as 
they did ! It is enough to make one tremble for 
himself to have such a heart-sounding as this gives 
him. I cast the lead for the depth of my soul, but I 
have little reason for pride." ^ 

He found relief from these moods of dis- 
couragement in Art and in Nature. In August he 
went over to Paris and noted the life of the common 
people, and the immense and startling impressions 
made upon his own mind by the prodigious wealth 
and beauty of the art galleries. "I knew that I had 
gradually grown fond of pictures from my boyhood. 
I had felt the power of some few. But nothing had 
ever come up to a certain ideal that hovered in my 
mind, and I supposed I was not fine enough to appre- 



»" Biography," pp. 345-346. 



THE PRIVATE AND PEACEFUL MINISTRY. 143 

ciate with any discrimination the works of masters. 
To find myself absolutely intoxicated ; to find my 
system so much affected that I could not control my 
nerves ; to find myself trembling and laughing, and 
weeping, and almost hysterical, and that in spite of 
my shame and determination to behave better — such 
a power of these galleries over me I had not expected. 
I have lived for two days in fairyland, wakened out 
of it by some few sights which I have mechanically 
visited, "more for the sake of pleasing friends at 
home, when I return, than for a present pleasure for 
myself, but relapsing again into the golden vision."^ 
He described a state of trance, of happy exaltation 
when he almost seemed to himself to float out of his 
body, that came to him while gazing at these master- 
pieces. " The subjects of many of the works — suffering, 
heroic resistance, angels. Arcadian scenes, especially 
the scenes of Christ's life and death — seemed not 
unfitting accompaniment to my mind and suggested 
to me, in a glorious vision, the drawing near of the 
redeemed souls to the precincts of Heaven ! O I 
with what an outburst of soul did I implore Christ 
to wash me, and all whom I loved, in His precious 
blood, that we might not fail of entering the glorious 
city whose builder and maker is God ! All my sins 
seemed not only sins but great deformities. They 
seemed not merely affronts against God but insults 
to my own nature ! My soul Snuffed at them and 
trod them down as the mire in the street. Then, 
holy and loving thoughts toward God or toward man 
seemed to me to be as beautiful as those fleecy islets 



^ " Star Papers," p. 57. 



144 HENRY WARD BEECHER, 

along the West at sunset, crowned witli glory ; and 
the gentler aspirations for goodness and nobleness 
and knowledge seemed to me like silver mists through 
which the morning is striking, wafting them gently 
and in wreaths and films heavenward. Great deeds, 
heroism for worthy objects, for God, or for one's 
fellows, or for one's own purity, seem not only natu- 
ral but as things without which a soul could not 
live." ' 

Such emotions were fatiguing and some would 
say almost morbid, but they are a key to the magnifi- 
cent possibilities of eloquence on religious themes 
which he afterwards and often illustrated, and 
perhaps they are also a key to the almost reck- 
less heroism of self-sacrifice which, disregarding 
the voice of selfish prudence, brought him into 
some of his most terrible sorrows. It is inter- 
esting to remember one habit of his, maintained 
in Paris, which is quite in contrast with the custom 
of many of his fellow countrymen who travel abroad. 
Writing to his daughter in 1859 he says: "When I 
was in Paris I acted just as I do in Brooklyn. I took 
no more liberties, and was quite as observant of my 
home proprieties. And I must say that I do not 
relish the idea of our young countrymen going to 
Europe to learn how to get rid of religious habits. 
Foreign travel should improve our manners, increase 
our information, enlarge our experience of men, 
enrich our imagination, cultivate our tastes, but nof 
enervate our conscience." ^ 



1 " Star Papers," p. 61. ^ •« Biography," p. 384. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

REVIVALS. NATURE. MUSIC. 

He returned to America restored in health, and 
shortly after his arrival home he wrote for the New 
York Independent a letter denouncing what he deemed 
the bigotry and intolerance practised upon the 
Cunard steamer. *' No one was allowed to read the 
service there except the captain, who, having been 
playing cards late Saturday night, and being addicted 
to the sailor habit of profanity, was not considered 
fit for the office.'" 

Mr. Beecher was a born fighter for what he deemed 
truth and liberty. His articles in the New York 
Independent from this time began to attract wide 
attention, and in truth many of these Star papers are 
as brimful of genius, witty observations on a great 
variety of themes, and of helpful suggestions as any- 
thing which he ever wrote. He defended the Jenny 
Lind managers for the high price of tickets de- 
manded for her famous concerts, and said : "Jenny 
Lind, if we understand her desires and aims, is 
employing a resplendent musical genius in the mo^t 
noble accordance with the spirit of the Gospel. In 



^ " Biography," p. 350. 
10 



146 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

her we behold a spectacle of eminent genius employ- 
ing its magic power in the elevation of the human 
race. If men would spare from the disgusting weed 
and poisonous liquors one-half of what they spend 
every month, there are few so poor as not to be able 
to hear Jenny Lind." ^ 

He gave a cordial welcome to Kossuth, and for 
weeks entertained in his own house Kossuth's chief 
of staff with his wife. In 1852 his family was enlarged 
by the birth of twin sons. 

The Church entered upon its work that year without 
debt, and Mr. Beechermade an earnest effort to secure 
a spiritual prosperity equally ample with that tem- 
poral prosperity that his Church enjoyed. This 
earnest effort was eminently successful. The great 
revival in Plymouth Church occurred in 1858, but 
others preceded it, and the methods by which he 
labored for these periods of moral quickening appear 
to have been definitely fixed in his mind from the 
beginning of his great pastorate. 

No part of his ^' Yale Lectures on Preaching " is 
more vivid and vital with his deepest convictions than 
the chapters on the Philosophy of Revivals, Revivals 
Subject to Law, and the Conduct of Revivals. The 
great popular uprising of the Jews in the rebuilding 
of their temple, the three great annual visits of the 
whole Jewish male population to Jerusalem, he held 
were nothing more than protracted meetings. He 
regarded Christ's Galilean life and ministry as only a 
state of religious revival. He believed that revivals 
have a large place in the modern Church. " These 



^ " Biography," p. 351. 



REVIVALS. NATURE. MUSIC. I47 

great divine freshets " he likened to the rains upon 
the mountains, "which filled the immediate channels 
fuller Ihan they can hold," overflow their banks, and 
spread fertility on every side. 

He believed that the acquiescent, the frigid, the 
torpid condition of the human faculties needed to be 
stirred and fired that they might have their best 
development. The regular institutions of the Church 
are inadequate to produce these results in whole com- 
munities. " The Church has not been broad enough 
to spread over the whole population and brood it." 
Since so large a proportion are outside of the Churches, 
he believed that these revival efforts were indispen- 
sably necessary if the Gospel is to be preached to all 
men. The Churches themselves need reviving to 
counteract the formalism begotten by regularity and 
organization. Life is better than death, religious 
excitation is wholesome and not perilous. Men are 
not afraid of excitement in politics or in commerce; 
it is the sign of vigorous life. We are not in danger of 
too much or too continuous excitement in spiritual 
directions. 

" Do not the sounds of life drown the thunders of 
eternity in men's ears ? Are there not ten thousand 
boiling cauldrons of passion and feeling underneath 
them ? Is not every great interest of society pulling 
upon them— the household, the store, the shop, the 
office, all processes of business and of civil society ? 
Are not men wrecked with the thousand worldly 
things tliat are tending to undermine faith, to blind 
spiritual vision ? And is it not a great grace and 
mercy when, even if it comes with imperfection — and 
what man is without it ? — there is an excitement that 



148 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

lifts men out of the slough, lifts them out of all their 
entanglements?"^ 

There are deceptions and spurious conversions 
under every economy and method. ''Men that 
attempt to come into the Kingdom of God head first 
are just as liable to go wrong as those that go heart 
first: I think that they are more liable to go wrong. 
The regular Church is to a revival what green- 
houses are to the summer. Greenhouses do very 
well; they make heat; they have their own stove and 
stoker; all they want is brought into their little space, 
and when, by and by, the robins and bluebirds come, 
and the elms begin to bud and the maples show their 
tassels, and people say that summer is abroad in the 
land, the old gardener walks out, and says, * Look 
here, I don't like this summer ! There are no toads 
in my house, but there will be toads abroad now 
soon. Snakes don't get in here, this is safe, but 
there will be snakes in the woods if summer comes. 
It won't do for us to have this thing all over the land.' 
Summer, if it does bring mosquitoes, is more desirable 
than are greenhouses, for vegetation, for fruit, or for 
anything else." 

High feeling results in clear seeing. Revivals 
raise the tone of Church piety. Mr. Beecher believed 
that the Divine Spirit was not capricious, and that 
revivals are under the law of cause and effect. Their 
conformableness to law " is the foundation of educa- 
tion and knowledge in the production of emotion, or 
in the production and conduct of all spiritual proc- 
esses."- "To get up a reformation in the matter of 



* *' Yale Lectures on Preaching," Vol. II., p. 226. 



REVIVALS. NATURE. MUSIC. T49 

gambling or drinking is looked upon as normal and 
right; but to stir men up in behalf of the whole 
extent of their moral character and life, is not 
that normal also ? Is there anything ridiculous in 
that?"^ 

Mr. Beecher acted on the theory that it is wise and 
best to bring to bear on the religious sensibilities 
whatever influences are wholesome. He believed 
that beauty may be made of constant service to 
religion. He believed in liturgies, especially the 
Congregational Liturgy, improved as he strove to 
improve it in Plymouth Church. He thought the 
ordinary services of non-liturgical Churches w^ere 
usually barren from the want of common sympathy. 
He believed it to be the office of the minister to 
develop the gifts of all the members of the Church, 
to inspire and drill them so that the common worship 
would show an abundance of wholesome feeling, 
because those who joined in it abounded in spiritual 
vitality. 

^' A dead Church with a liturgy on top is like a 
sand desert covered with artificial bouquets. It's 
bright for the moment. But it is fictitious and fruit- 
less. There are no roots to the flowers. There is no 
soil for the roots. The utmost that a liturgy can do 
upon the chilly bosom of an undeveloped, untrained 
Church is to cover its nakedness with a faint shadow 
of what they fain would have, but cannot get." ^ 

Mr. Beecher had so warm a feeling to'vard the Epis- 
copal Church, of which his mother was a member, 



^ " Yahe Lectures on Preaching," Vol. XL, p. 249. 
2 " New Star Papers,' p. 259. 



150 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

that what he has written about liturgies must never 
be taken as the slightest reflection upon Episcopalian 
forms. 

As multitudes remember, it was early the custom of 
Plymouth Church to introduce floral decorations as 
**the signs of gladness," "offerings of joyful hearts to 
God," in the. services of the sanctuary. This was in 
accord with some of Mr. Beecher's deepest thoughts 
with regard to the uses of the things that God has 
made. He believed that mission Churches and all 
others might well be decorated with a few flowers to 
light up their dreariness, or to suggest, even in the 
midst of man's most beautiful handiwork, the nobler 
beauty of God's workmanship. In this, as in so many 
other things, Plymouth Church was a pioneer. How 
much of America's intellectual and religious eman- 
cipation and enlightenment is due to the brave, broad- 
minded servant of God, unfettered by conventional- 
ism, who was determined to have the life of the 
Church to which he ministered, conformed to his 
best thought and highest aspirations ! 

Mr. Beecher gained a world-wide celebrity as a po- 
litical and social reformer; he was marvelously 
sensitive to what he deemed injustice. But he was 
also a great teacher in the realm of the beautiful. He 
believed that he owed to Ruskin more than to any 
other modern teacher " for the blessings of siglit." 
*' Thousands of golden hours and materials, both for 
self-enjoyment and the. instruction of others, enough 
to fill up our whole life, we owe to the spirit excited 
in us by the reading of Ruskin's early works. The 
sky, the earth, and the waters are no longer what 
they were to us. We have learned a language and 



REVIVALS. NATURE. MUSIC. I5I 

come to a sympathy in them more through the 
instrumentality of Ruskin's works than by all other 
instrumentalities on earth, excepting, always, the 
nature which my mother gave me — sainted be her 
name." ^ 

The summers of 1852 and 1853 he spent in Salis- 
bury, Conn., listening to the birds and crickets, the 
grasshoppers and the cattle. Lying on the grass of a 
tufted knoll, gazing up into the sky, he dreamed and 
yearned with feelings and thoughts commingled, 
while tears came unbidden. His twin boys had 
died, and been buried in one grave, and from this 
time on Mr. Beecher's heart may be said to have 
been a fountain of sympathy. 

Tlie next summer he spent in Lenox, Mass., 
where he purchased a farm, and knew the pleasures 
and solemnities of ownership in the soil. He has 
recorded his feelings in the presence of an elm-tree 
standing in his pasture. It seemed to him that there 
was almost a sacrilege " in the very thought oi property 
in such a creature of God as this cathedral-topped 
tree! Does a man bare his head in some old church? 
So did I, standing in the shadow of this regal tree, 
and looking up into that completed glory at which 
three hundred years had been at work with noiseless 
fingers! What was I in its presence but a grasshop- 
per ? My heart said : ' I may not call thee property, 
and that property mine ! Thou belongest to the air. 
Thou art the child of summer. Thou art the mighty 
temple where birds praise God. Thou belongest to 
no man's hand, but to all men's eyes that do love 



» " Biography," p. 394. 



152 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

beauty, and that have learned through beauty to 
behold God!'"^ 

Mr. Beecher had very liberal ideas in regard to the 
highest uses of a farm. *' The chief use of a farm, if 
it be well selected and of a proper soil, is to lie down 
upon. Mine is an excellent farm for such uses, and I 
thus cultivate it every day. Large crops are the con- 
sequence, of great delight and fancies more than the 
brain can hold. My industry is exemplary. Though 
but a week here, I have lain down more hours, and in 
more places, than that hard-working brother of mine 
in the whole year that he has dwelt here. Strange 
that industrious lying down should come so natural 
to me, and standing up and lazing about after 
the plow or behind the scythe so natural to 
him!"^ 

Thus working and resting the years went by. In 
1855, the hymn book, known as "The Plymouth Col- 
lection," the pioneer of a large class of similar books, 
was published by him. 

Some years before this he had published a small 
book called "Temple Melodies," the music of which 
was selected by Mr. Jones, the conductor of the music 
in Plymouth Church, and by himself. Though Mr. 
Beecher was the father of this little hymn book, the 
publishers, the Mason Brothers, of New York, omitted 
from it any mention of him, being unwilling that the 
name of an " accursed Abolitionist " should appear 
in it. 

" The Plymouth Collection," like all of Mr. Beecher's 
intellectual children, was violently attacked. In his 



1 " Star Papers," p. 280. 2 '« Slar Papers." p. 268. 



REVIVALS. NATURE. MUSIC. 1 53 

defense, written as a Star paper for The Independent, 
he convicted his critics of great ignorance and amazed 
some of his friends by his own wide knowledge. In 
this article occur some of the most brilliant and 
characteristically eloquent sentences that ever came 
from his pen. 

" Hymns are the exponents of the inmost piety of 
the Church. They are crystalline tears, or blossoms 
of joy, or holy prayers, or incarnated raptures. They 
are the jewels which the Church has worn; the pearls, 
the diamonds, and precious stones formed into amulets 
more potent against sorrow and sadness than the 
most famous charms of wizard or magician. And he 
who knows the way hymns flowed, knows where the 
blood of piety ran, and can trace its veins and arteries 
to the very heart." 

" There are Crusaders' Hymns, that rolled forth 
their truths upon the Oriental air, while a thousand 
horses* hoofs kept time below and ten thousand palm- 
leaves whispered and kept time above! Other hymns, 
fulfilling the promise of God, that His saints should 
mount up with wings as eagles, have borne up the 
sorrows, the desires, and the aspirations of the poor, 
the oppressed and the persecuted, of Huguenots, of 
Covenanters, and of Puritans, and winged them to the 
bosom of God." 

"One hymn hath opened the morning in ten thou- 
sand families, and dear children with sweet voices have 
charmed the evening in a thousand places with the 
utterance of another. Nor do I know of any steps 
now left on earth by which one may so soon rise above 
trouble or weariness as the verses of a hymn and the 
notes of a tune. And if the angels that Jacob saw 



154 HENRY WARD REECHER. 

sang when they appeared, then I know that the ladder 
which he beheld was but the scale of divine music let 
down from heaven to earth." 

He was right in thinking his book destined to inau- 
gurate a new era in Church music. He himself said of 
it: " It was made on a theory of my own, or rather it 
was the result of my observation and experience. I 
had observed what hymns appealed to the imagination 
and affection of the people; and I did not believe that 
any hymn book would ever be popular which had not 
in it hymns, the elements of which appealed to these 
faculties. I had observed, also, what tunes the people 
loved. I had observed that any music, however 
irregular or grotesque, that appealed to their imagi- 
nation and affection, they would adopt and make their 
own." He believed that music was one of the most 
important aids to the highest offices of the preacher, 
and regarded it as an agent, " in affecting not so 
much the understanding as that part of a man's 
nature which the sermon leaves comparatively 
barren." 

He looked upon music as the preacher's prime- 
minister, " inciting to emotion through the imagina- 
tion, through the taste, through the feeling." He 
spoke very intelligently and discriminatingly in his 
" Lectures on Preaching " of the relations of music to 
worship, and paid his loving tribute to John Zundel, 
who for many years was the organist of Plymouth 
Church, of whom he said: "To him music means 
worship and the organ means religion." He said of 
Zundel's handling of the organ: " It has brought tears 
to my eyes a hundred times; I have gone in jaded and 
unhearted, and have been caught up by him and 



REVIVALS. NATURE. MUSIC. 155 

lifted so that I saw the flash of the gates! I have 
been comforted, I have been helped."^ 

Perhaps no one has ever spoken more sensibly 
about the qualities of different organists or ridiculed 
more effectively the "vast number of persons who 
play without reason, without heart, without soul, and 
with no sort of religious foundation." The work of 
the organ, like preaching itself, is only a means to an 
end. Not many are inspired with the conception 
that they are the servants of God whose office it is to 
inspire the nobler sentiments of men, and who that 
heard it will ever forget his description of " the musical 
monkeys, dancing on their organ, playing up and 
down, rattling all sorts of waltzes, with a long leg 
stretched out here and there to make it sound like 
Sunday music ?" ^ 

He believed that the minister should know enougfh 
to be the bishop of the organ and organist, as well as 
of the congregation. The congregational singing of 
Plymouth Church, under Mr. Beecher's leadership, 
ultimately became a fine art, but this great achieve- 
ment was the result of persistent urging and inspira- 
tion on his part. 



^ " Yale Lectures oil Preaching," Vol. II., p. 123. 
^ " Yale Lectures on Preaching," Vol. II., p. 125. 



CHAPTER XV. 

CAUSES OF POPULARITY AND UNPOPULARITY. 

Mr. Beecher's phenomenal genius and novel meth- 
ods gained him a wide popularity. Probably no Amer- 
ican of our century, neither Mr. Blaine nor Phillips 
Brooks, has surpassed him in magnetic power, the fac- 
ulty of drawing and holding men, " the art Napoleon " 
of moving and blending many minds into one. But it 
should be noted at this point that his unpopularity 
was even wider than his popularity. He had 
mingled politics with religion, he had championed 
the Abolition cause, he was believed to be an inno- 
vator in theology. Dull minds could not understand 
him. Those wedded to conventional methods did 
not like him nor trust him. He was widely misun- 
derstood. Multitudes failed to catch the true mean- 
ing of his speech because it did not come to them 
in familiar forms. He introduced a new phraseology 
into his discussion of the doctrines, he discarded all 
hackneyed phrases, and probably he was the most 
misreported man of his generation. 

There are thousands living to-day who have in 
their minds a strong prejudice against Mr. Beecher, 
whose chief knowledge of him has come from gro- 
tesque passages culled from his sermons by newspa- 
per mer anxious to make a readable, and especially a 
sensational half column, in the next morning's jour- 



CAUSES OF POPULARITY AND UNPOPULARITY. 157 

nal. Multitudes of his friends were year after year 
shocked by these garbled sentences and sensational 
passages, removed out of all connection with the 
serious and earnest thoughts of his discourses. For 
many years '' what Beecher said " was caught up by 
a hundred journals, and scattered broadcast over 
the continent. And as most people, unfortunately, 
confine their reading to the daily press, very many 
have lived and died with an utterly erroneous im- 
pression of the spirit of Mr. Beecher's ministry. 

In 1884 Mr. Beecher freed his mind about this 
thing before the New York and Brooklyn Associa- 
tion of Ministers and Churches. He did not decry 
the usefulness of reporters, but ventured to suggest 
that they were not omniscient in theology and phi- 
losophy, and were not usually skillful in putting the 
sense of a discourse into* a reading space of five min- 
utes. " For more than twenty-five years there is not 
a man on the globe who has been reported so much 
as I have been in my private meetings, in my street 
conversation, on the platform at public meetings, and 
steadily in the pulpit; a great many times admirably, 
and sometimes abominably. This has been going on 
week after week and year after year. Do you sup- 
pose I could follow up all misstatements and rectify 
them ? . . . A man might run around like a kitten 
after its tail, all his life, if he were going around ex- 
plaining all reports of his expressions and all the 
things he had written. Let them go. They will cor- 
rect themselves. The average and general influence 
of a man's teaching will be more mighty than any 
single misconception, or misapprehension through 
misconception." 



158 HENRY WARD BEECHER, 

There is large truth in this, and yet Mr. Beecher 
suffered through his whole life, and his just fame has 
widely suffered since his death, from a misunderstand- 
ing of what he said and did, through inadequate and 
misleading reports. A friend of Mr. Beecher writes 
of an experience which occurred at the Plankinton 
House, Milwaukee. " In the afternoon a reporter 
called and wished to interview Mr. Beecher upon any 
subject he was willing to discuss. Mr. Beecher said 
that he had just had his dinner, and he wished the 
reporter would excuse him, that he might have his 
afternoon nap, and added : ' Here is Blank ; you talk 
with him, and ask all the questions you want to ; he 
will tell you all about myself that I could tell you.' 
So the reporter asked me several questions concern- 
ing Mr, Beecher's trip, lectures, plans, etc., and when 
he was through I asked him how he liked this sort of 
business, going about interviewing people and asking 
them questions. He said he didn't like it very well, 
but that he did not do it all the year ; he reported for 
the Milwaukee Sentinel in the winter, and in the sum- 
mer he went with the circus. I was talking with Mr. 
Beecher about it in the evening, and it was mentioned 
that this was one of the sort of men who, knowing 
nothing about theology or theological points, re- 
ported his theological discussions and sermons for the 
daily press, and upon whose reports he was judged 
by his fellow clergymen." 

It was one of the trials and misfortunes of a man 
of much interest to so many people, that he suffered 
so greatly in an age of enterprising, audacious, care- 
less, and sometimes reckless and unscrupulous jour- 
nalism. His own lack of verbal memory, though 



CAUSES OF POPULARITY AND UNPOPULARITY. I59 

doubtless a help to his extemporaneous abundance 
of original speech, was a loss, in some instances, to 
accuracy in his public utterances, and his gravest 
addresses abounded with so much of wit, grotesque 
humor, and stinging denunciation, that it was very- 
easy to compile from his addresses what did not give 
a fair impression of the general tenor of his speech. 

A chief occasion for Mr. Beecher's unpopularity 
with the fastidious was the frequent and usually 
needless shock which he gave " to their conventional 
nerves." He was a defender of naturalness, fitness, 
good taste, and propriety in the pulpit, and he usually 
practiced the virtues which he inculcated. But there 
are those to whom naturalness in the pulpit is offen- 
sive. Beecher's nature, for example, had so much of 
spontaneousness, impulsive enthusiasm, overflowing 
wit and humor, that he seemed a great departure 
from those conventionalities of the pulpit which are 
usually pleasing to the average man. 

Mr. N. D. Pratt, in his reminiscences of Mr. Beecher 
and Plymouth Church, writes: 

" The services were cheerful, earnest, interesting, 
and frequently entertaining; he did not hesitate to 
make the people laugh if he chose; frequently they 
broke forth in applause. In speaking once of the use 
of humor to influence men, he said: ' Every bell in 
my belfry shall ring to help influence men.' 

" One Thanksgiving Day he had preached one of his 
strong, patriotic sermons, and just as he had finished 
reading the hymn, at the close of the service, and sat 
down, a large rnan with a stentorian voice, in the 
gallery, rose and said: ' Mr. Beecher, if your Thanks- 
giving dinner is as good as your sermon has been, I 



l6o HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

would like to be invited home to dine with you/ 
On another occasion he announced, on Sunday 
morning, that Anna Dickinson would speak at his 
Church on the following Tuesday evening; he said: 
* The Academy of Music that is used for theatres and 
operas, and for every sort of entertainment for which 
a hall can be used, has been denied this woman, and 
so I have offered her Plymouth Church, where she 
may speak upon the subject of liberty.' Some one in 
the congregation sang out: 'Mr. Beecher, you are 
mistaken; the Academy of Music was not denied Miss 
Dickinson.' Mr. Beecher said quietly: ' I am informed 
by one who should know, that I am mistaken, and 
that the Academy of Music was not denied Miss 
Dickinson.' Immediately a person rose and said: 'Mr. 
Beecher, you are right; the Academy of Music was 
denied Miss Dickinson.' Mr. Beecher quietly re- 
marked: 'I am informed by one who should know, 
that I am right, and that the Academy of Music was 
denied Miss Dickinson; well, brethren, let us merge 
all our little troubles in singing the four hundred and 
fiftieth hymn.' 

" I recall a statement that Avas frequently made with 
reference to Mr. Beecher's entering the pulpit one 
warm summer morning, and wiping the perspiration 

from his forehead, exclaiming: ' It's a d d hot 

day,' stood for a moment, and then proceeded to say 
that, as he was coming to Church that morning, he 
overheard a young man make that remark, and so he 
would take occasion to preach a sermon upon the 
subject of profanity. This story was told in every 
newspaper in the countr)'". Every few years it would 
be brought up and would make its rounds through 



CAUSES OF POPULARITY AND UNPOPULARITY. l6l 

the papers, and thousands of people believed that it 
was an actual occurrence. Mr. Beecher contradicted 
it over his own signature in the New York Independent^ 
stating that it was the last time he would ever make 
a contradiction of such an absurd story." 

Then Mr. Beecher's liberal ideas in regard to other 
Churches were not grateful to many of his own 
denomination and he put so much more emphasis 
upon the truth of Christianity than on sectarian 
tenets and practices, that sectarians could never 
count on him as one of their sort. He had to be 
contented through life to be deemed unorthodox by 
multitudes whom he loved and who did not feel so 
strongly as he did that the great orthodoxy was 
being like Christ and doing His will. 

These years which we have considered were years 
of growth in a great variety of directions. It is not 
usually known that, though Mr. Beecher was pre- 
eminently a student of Nature and of human nature, 
he was always a great reader. Those who know his 
public speeches will not be surprised to learn that he 
made a careful study of the constitutional history of 
America, and those who are familiar with his sermons 
will gain some idea of the variety of things he knew. 
Mr. John R. Howard writes of him: ''He made it a 
point to follow up in literature as well as in practical 
research every topic that greatly interested him. 
Sometimes it was the general history of art, or the 
special development of architecture, of painting, of 
sculpture, of engraving, of etching; and his library 
showed illustrations of all those splendid lines of 
thought and achievement; and it was not upon his 
book-shelves and walls alone, but in himself that 
II 



l62 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

could be found unusual stores of knowledge. Music 
and organ-building; soap and cosmetics; pottery and 
porcelains; large additions to his already extensive 
knowledge of flowers, trees, and methods of cultiva- 
tion; general literature, history, theology, meta- 
physics, natural science, and especially the whole 
line of philosophic literature which tends towards the 
coordination of these great departments: physiology, 
anatoni}', and medicine, and, in short, a large array 
of books upon topics of interest to all humanity, and, 
therefore, not foreign to him, bore witness to the 
incessant labor with which he stored his growing 
mind." 



CHAPTER XVI. 



THE BATTLE FOR FREEDOM. 



The slavery question was the most tremendous 
and vital of all the political and moral problems 
which the American people ever had to solve. Now 
that the solution has come, men are in peril of for- 
getting its significance and the enormous cost of its 
settlement. Mr. Beecher was drawn into political 
controversy and agitation because the controversies 
of his time involved all the principles of humanity 
and of religion. 

Joseph Cook has well said : " His was not a sickly 
philanthropy, based upon merely political considera- 
tions. It was a religious philanthropy. His tireless 
lectures on reform were secular sermons. This was 
the glory of his anti-slavery career, that it sprang 
from religious motives. This was what made him so 
excoriate all crimes against the dignity of the human 
spirit, whether on the part of the capitalist, or of 
the slave-driver, or of the politicians in a corrupt 
party. All was to be brought into harmony with 
Christ's kingdom; and his watchword was really that 
of our best reformers to-day, that Christ is King, and 
that on His shoulder is laid the government of the 
world." ' 



^ " Current Religious Perils," p. 142. 



164 HENRY WARD BEECHER.' 

It was inevitable that Mr. Beecher should become 
a leader in the agitation which, at last, emboldened 
Lincoln, in the crisis of the war, to write freedom on 
the national flag. As Mr. Lowell wrote in the midst 
of those agitations: " It is not partisanship, it is not 
fanaticism, that has forced this matter of anti-slavery 
upon the American people; it is the spirit of Christi- 
anity, which appeals from prejudices and predelic- 
tions to the moral consciousness of the individual 
man; that spirit elastic as air, penetrative as heat, 
invulnerable as sunshine, against which creed after 
creed and institution after institution have measured 
their strength and been confounded." * 

It was the Spirit of Jesus Christ which created and 
directed the anti-slavery movement in America. 
That Spirit recognized the absolute humanity of the 
negro slave, and taught the great apostles of free- 
dom that a soul created in the image of God and 
bought by the blood-drops of Calvary, cannot rightly 
be treated as merchandise. The cause in which Mr. 
Beecher with his whole soul was enlisted, was a 
Christian cause undertaken by Christian men, most 
of them orthodox Christian men, as Garrison him- 
self was at the start. The first appeal of the first 
anti-slavery society was written by Moses Thatcher, 
afterwards a Presbyterian minister. The American 
Anti-Slavery Society had for its first presiding officer 
the Rev. Beriah Green. Its " Declaration of Senti- 
ments" planted itself on ''the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence and the truths of the divine revelation, as 
upon everlasting rock." William Jay, who wrote 



» " Lowell's Prose Works," Vol. 5. p. 15. 



THE BATTLE FOR FREEDOM. 165 

powerfully for emancipation, was a devoted Episco- 
palian, and the chief men who fought this greatest 
of moral battles from the hour when Garrison in an 
" obscure hole " in Boston sent out the first Liberator 
to the hour when Lincoln wrote his proclamation, 
were, with few exceptions, men who bound the Bible 
to their hearts as the Word of God and the word of 
humanity. 

But the Church of America was greatly divided. 
While the moral agitation which attacked slavery 
was of Christian origin, the Churches, as organized 
bodies, were largely favorable to a compromise with 
the slave-power. " The great publishing societies 
that were sustained by the contributions of the 
Churches " were, as Mr. Beecher said, " absolutely 
dumb. Great controversies raged around about the 
doors of the Bible Society, of the Tract Society, and 
of the American Board for Foreign Missions. The 
managers of these societies resorted to every shift 
except that of sending the Gospel to the slaves. They 
would not send the Bible to the South; for, they said, 
* it is a punishable offense in most of the Southern 
States to teach a slave to read; and are we to go in 
the face of this State legislation and send the Bible 
South?* The Tract Society said: 'We are set up to 
preach the Gospel, not to meddle with political and 
industrial institutions.' And so they went on print- 
ing tracts against tobacco and its abuses, tracts 
against dancing and its abuses, and refusing to print 
a tract that had a shadow of criticism on slavery ! " 

" What claim," asked Lowell, " has slavery to 
immunity from discussion? We are told that dis- 
cussion is dangerous. Dangerous to what ? Truth 



l66 HENRY WARD BF.ECHER. 

invites it, courts the point of Ithuriel's spear — whose 
touch can but reveal more clearly the grace and 
grandeur of her angelic proportions. The advocates 
of slavery have taken refuge in the last covert of 
desperate sophism, and affirm that their institution is 
of divine ordination, that its bases are laid in the 
nature of man. Is anything, then, of God's contriv- 
ing endangered by inquiry? Was it the system of 
the universe, or the monks, that trembled at the 
telescope of Galileo ? Did the circulation of the 
firmament stop in terror because Newton laid his 
daring finger on its pulse? " ^ 

The unpopularity of the anti-slavery cause was in 
truth one chief argument for Mr. Beecher's whole- 
souled enlistment in it. " Jesus knows," he said, 
*'that for His sake I smote with the sword and with 
the spear, not because I loved controversy, but 
because I loved truth and humanity; and because I 
saw weak men flinch, and because I saw base men 
truckle and bargain, and because I saw the cause of 
Christ was likely to suffer, and I will fight to the end." * 

The champion reform fighter was not naturally a 
belligerent man, but it was inevitable that he should 
rush in where the conflict was hottest. Recalling the 
state of things at the beginning of his Brooklyn 
ministry he said: "When I came here you could get 
no great missionary society, Bible society, or tract 
society to say one solitary word for the slave. Such 
were the interests of the mercantile classes of the 
South that it was extremely difficult to exert there 



1" Lowell's Prose Works," Vol. V., p. 13. 

^" A Summer in England with Henry Ward Beecher," p. 39. 



THE BATTLE FOR FREEDOM. 167 

any anti-slavery influence. . . . Those who did 
not live then can have no conception of what it was 
to form a Church that should stand right out in the 
intense light of the time, and declare for universal 
liberty and for the right of the slave to the Bible, and 
to full religious freedom. This Church grew up right 
against a flinty way of bitterness and opposition."^ 

One of the chief eras of the anti-slavery agitation 
opened in 1850, at about the time that the Plymouth 
congregation entered their new house of worship. 
Mr. Beecher's anti-slavery career belongs to the 
second stage of the great fight, when moral agitation 
became blended with political action. From 1850 to 
his death he was a great public force in American 
life, easily outranking all other preachers of the Gos- 
pel and eclipsing all but a very few of our statesmen. 

As a reformer he thundered louder and with more 
reverberations than any other agitator, unless we 
make the single exception of Wendell Phillips. 
Beecher kept closer to the average feelings and con- 
victions of the people than did Phillips. The Boston 
Abolitionist was a strenuous idealist, a leader of lead- 
ers. He was like Milton, of whom Coleridge said 
that he was so far ahead of his age that he seemed 
small, though, like Milton, he looms larger and larger 
with the passing years. Wendell Phillips's quench- 
less zeal was the outcome of his passion for right- 
eousness; Beecher's flaming enthusiasm sprang from 
his glowing love to humanity. His deep sympathies 
with his fellow men were outraged by slavery, and 
his right to speak from the pulpit on this theme was 



Biography," p. 221. ] 



1 68 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

to him a sun that made bright his path to the advo- 
cacy of all other moral reforms. He is the chief 
champion in the New World of the pulpit's duty to 
apply Christianity to all the great ethical concerns of 
business and society. He said: "The moment a man 
so conducts his profession that it touches the ques- 
tion of right and wrong, he comes into my sphere. 
There I stand; and I put God's measure, the golden 
reed of the sanctuary, on him and his course; and I 
am his master, if I be a true seer and a true moral 
teacher." 

No other volume of addresses is better worth the 
careful study of the young men of our times than Mr. 
Beecher's speeches on Freedom, Slavery, and the 
Civil War. They have not the vast learning of 
Sumner's elaborate orations, nor all of the brilliancy 
and pungency of Wendell Phillips's speeches, but 
they are not wanting in the highest qualities of time- 
liness, eloquence, and wisdom. Their light is equal 
to their heat, and their heat at times is like the cen- 
tral fires of the sun. 

Beecher justly holds a place in the front rank of 
anti-slavery reformers. The men and women, who 
contributed to the moral education of the Nation in 
that long struggle, did not all walk in the same path. 
In different ways and far different degrees they con- 
tributed to the beneficent result. There was Ben- 
jamin Lundy, the Quaker printer, the pioneer even of 
Garrison ; there was George Thompson, the English 
orator, whom America mobbed, and after thirty years, 
showered with national honors. 

There was William Lloyd Garrison, the master 
who inspired many that chose different methods from 



THL BATTLE FOR FREEDOM. 1 69 

his. There were Edmund Quincy, the Boston patri- 
cian, and James G. Birney, the Kentucky slave- 
holder, who freed his slaves for conscience's sake. 
There were preachers of all shades of opinion, the 
illustrious Channing; Parker, the Jupiter of liberal- 
lism; the saintly Samuel J. May; his cousin, Samuel 
May ; Lucretia Mott, who approached so nearly the 
perfection of human character, and Thomas Went- 
worth Higginson, preacher, soldier, and scholar, of 
whom Lowell said : " He comes down from his pulpit 
to draw on his jack-boots and thencefortli rides, in 
our imagination, alongside of John Bunyan and 
Bishop Compton." 

There was Amos A. Phelps, who gave perhaps the 
best definition of slavery as the " holding of a human 
being as property " ; there was George B. Cheever, a 
grand Puritan of the seventeenth century, floated 
down into the nineteenth ; there was Albert Barnes 
who said : " There is no power out of the Church 
that could sustain slavery an hour if it were not sus- 
tained in it ;" there was Charles B. Storrs, of an illus- 
trious family, who died early in the struggle ; there 
was Leonard Bacon, of New Haven, the lion-hearted 
debater, from reading one of whose sermons Abraham 
Lincoln declared that he derived his deeper anti- 
slavery convictions ; and there was the greatest of 
modern evangelists, President Charles G. Finney. 
Then there were poets, like Whittier, the man of 
peace, to whom a friendly poet sang : 

"Yet for thy brother's sake, 
That lay in bonds, thou blewst a blast as bold 
As that wherewith the heart of Roland break, 
Far heard across the New World and the Old." 



I70 HENRY WARD BEFXHER. 

There was James Russell Lowell, who early 
became an Abolitionist, and who, both in splendid 
prose and trenchant verse, rendered bravest service 
to the slave. There was John Pierpont, an early 
champion of reform ; there was William Cullen 
Bryant, who, later on in the conflict, proved that he 
who had uttered " the voices of the hills," and in 
whose song the " torrents had flashed and thun- 
dered," could sing of " Freedom's birthright," and 
breathe courage into the ranks of soldiers on the bat- 
tlefields. There was Ralph Waldo Emerson, '* that 
earthquake scholar of Concord," as Wendell Phillips 
called him, " whose serene word, like a whisper 
among the avalanches, topples down superstitions 
and prejudices." 

There were lecturers like Theodore G. Weld, Lucy 
Stone, Henry B. Stanton, Sarah and Angelina 
Grimke, and Mrs. Abbie Kelly Foster, who, in her 
later years, like some other of the early Abolition- 
ists, became cranky, and even mentally unsound. In 
the anti-slavery crusade were merchants and men of 
wealth like Francis Jackson, Arthur and Lewis 
Tappan, Henry C. Bowen, Isaac T. Hopper and 
Gerritt Smith. There were writers like Joshua 
Leavitt and Joseph P. Thompson, of The Tnde- 
pendent, Oliver Johnson, William Jay, Palfrey, the 
historian of New England, Elizur Wright, Gree- 
ley, Lydia Maria Child, and above all the author of 
that epoch-making volume, "Uncle Tom's Cabin." 
There were political anti-slavery leaders, like John 
Quincy Adams, Lincoln, Sumner, Chase, Owen 
Lovejoy, Seward, Hale, Thaddeus Stevens, Joshua R. 
Giddings, George William Curtis- John A. Andrew, 



THE BATTLE FOR FREEDOM. 17I 

and Henry Wilson ; these and many beside, some of 
whom are, as John Briglit said of the early Aboli- 
tionists, 

" On fame's eternal bead-roll worthy to be filed." 

Amid this mixed and illustrious compan}", Henry 
Ward Beecher stands in a place of peculiar and con- 
spicuous power. He did not belong to the Abolition 
party, but was in touch w4th them. He was not a 
debater and law-maker in the national Senate or House 
of Representatives, but quite as much as any other 
man he molded the popular sentiment which shapes 
legislation. 

In reading his written and spoken words we often 
feel that we are in the same moral atmosphere that 
surrounded Garrison and Phillips. But soon there 
comes a suii-burst of genial humor and Christian 
charity which contrasts his temper with that of those 
law-inspired apostles of righteousness. Sometimes, 
even in the earlier addresses, w^e find appeals to 
Christian patriotism loftier in spirit than Webster's 
most eloquent pleas for the Union. Unlike the lead- 
ing Abolitionists, he believed with Lincoln and Sum- 
ner, with Chase and Seward, that the Constitution, 
if rightly and properly administered, would circum- 
scribe the domain of slavery, stamp it as sectional 
and temporary, and doom it to certain death. The 
Garrisonian Abolitionists may claim, however, what 
the end showed to be true, that the Constitution 
needed to be purged and amended before it could 
rightly be deemed a thoroughly anti-slavery docu- 
ment. 

Cherishing the ballot-box as both the citadel and 



172 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

weapon of liberty, Beecher labored, not only to make 
public sentiment, but to crystallize it into political 
action. Moreover, working within the Church, while 
he sympathized in part with Garrison and Phillips in 
their unsparing denunciations of organized Christian- 
ity, still he believed that there was enough religion 
in the world, ^' in the Church and out of it," to destroy 
slavery, a spirit " which, in God's own time, in spite 
of recreant clergymen, apostate statesmen, venal poli- 
ticians, and trafficking shopmen, shall fall upon this 
vast and unmitigated abomination and utterly crush 
it. But my earnest desire," he said, " is that slavery 
shall be destroyed by the manifest power of Chris- 
tianity. If it were given to me to choose whether it 
should be destroyed in fifty years by selfish commer- 
cial influences, or, standing for seventy-five years, be 
then the spirit and trophy of Christ, I had rather let 
it linger twenty-five years more, that God may be 
honored, and not Mammon, in the destruction of it. 
So do I hate it that I should rejoice in its extinction, 
even did the devil tread it out as he first kindled it; 
but how much rather would I see God Almighty 
come down to shake the earth with His tread, to 
tread all tyrannies and oppressions small as the dust 
of the highway, and to take unto Himself the glory." 
These words taken from a letter to the New York 
Tribune^ indicate the utterly Christian spirit which, as 
it seemed to him, should be carried into this struggle. 
In another letter to the same paper he said: " I would 
work for the slave for his own sake, but I am sure 
that I would work ten times as earnestly for the slave 
for Christ's sake." He was the last man to pluck a 
single leaf from the brows of Garrison and Phillips, 



THE BATTLE FOR FREEDOM. 173 

but it was impossible for him to adopt all their 
methods, though he applauded the righteousness of 
their cause. " There was odium and influence enough 
arrayed against the anti-slavery movement, under 
the form of early Abolitionism to have sunk ten enter- 
prises which depended upon men for existence. But 
there was a spirit in this cause, there was a secret 
strength, which nerved it, and it lived right on, and 
grew, and trampled down opposition, and came forth 
victorious! There was an irresistibility in it which 
made it superior to the faults of its friends and the 
deadly hatred of its enemies." ^ 

No vivid picture of his career is possible except 
when drawn on the background of the moral darkness 
which had shrouded the land. Slavery had early been 
fastened on the American coast. In the century before 
1776, three million two hundred and fifty thousand 
negroes had been taken by Great Britain alone from 
the shores of Africa for the various colonies of the 
New World. A quarter of a million of these, accord- 
ing to Bancroft, perished in the horrors of the Atlantic 
voyage. Against the protest of many, slavery was 
introduced into the forming national life of America. 
" It's against the Gospel," said Governor Oglethorpe 
of Georgia. " The selling of souls is a dangerous 
merchandise," said John Eliot, the apostle to the 
Indians of Massachusetts. 

In the eighteenth century John Wesley and John 
Woolman, Hopkins, and the younger Edwards had 
written against the slave system. Abolition societies, 
chiefly of Christian men, were organized with such 



1 " 



Biograpliy,' 



174 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

officers as Franklin, Hamilton, and Jay. Jefferson had 
trembled for his country, remembering " that God is 
just," and that in a conflict between freedom and 
slavery, " God has no attribute which could take part 
with slaveholders." Climate, conscience, and the 
Gospel had combined to rid the Northern States of 
the remnants of slavery. Abolition sentiment was 
not dead at the South. As late as 1818, the General 
Assembly of the unbroken Presbyterian Church de- 
clared slavery " utterly inconsistent with the law of 
God," " and totally irreconcilable with the spirit and 
principles of Jesus Christ." 

But three fatal compromises had gone into the 
Constitution of 1787. The slaveholder, while retain- 
ing the negro as a chattel, was allowed to count him 
as three-fifths of a man and voter, thus gaining an 
important advantage in national legislation. The 
slave-trade was legalized in the year 1800, and the 
rendition of fugitives from bondage was made a part 
of the national compact, " in violation of the divine 
law," as Mr. Seward said in 1848. Then, at the close 
of the last century, the cotton-gin was invented, 
making every black baby worth one hundred dollars. 
Mew England manufacturers and Northern mer- 
chants were bound close to the Southern planters. 
The era of political good feeling and of wide pros- 
perity had dawned. After the Missouri Compromise 
of 1820, John Quincy Adams thought slavery so in- 
trenched that disunion was the only hope of the 
slave. Apologies for slavery were rife ; consciences 
were blinded; nothing must be done to disturb the 
slave-masters ; such disturbance would endanger the 
Union. Colonization societies, supported by good 



THE BATTLE FOR FREEDOM. 175 

and great men, planned to send the negroes, who had 
been stolen from Africa, back to its pestilence and 
barbarism, with or without their consent. 

Garrison began his agitation in 1831, and for nearly 
twenty years the nation had becorhe a great debating 
society, with slavery as the exasperating theme. 
Garrison and Phillips not only championed Aboli- 
tion, but came at last to advocate a peaceable separa- 
tion of the States, as best for the slave, freeing the 
North from fatal compromises. Meanwhile Webster 
was teaching a large portion of the American people 
to love the Union, and in his great debate with the 
South Carolina nullifiers he was storing, in the na- 
tional arsenal, the moral and intellectual ammuni- 
tion which was finally to blaze forth from a million 
rifles to destroy slavery and make the Union per- 
petual. 

But the love of the Union, which was the key to the 
public life of such men as Henry Clay, persuaded 
him, and most of the great statesmen of the country, 
to consent to compromises which might put off the 
coming conflict, but could not for ever avert it. The 
policy of maintaining an equilibrium between the 
free and slave States was a most diflicult one. The 
Mexican War had added largely to the national 
domain and had also quickened the national con- 
science and fear with regard to slavery. How shall 
the new territory be organized ? Shall new free 
States be permitted to disturb the equilibrium ? 

Henry Clay, on the 29th of January, 1850, intro- 
duced into the Senate his famous compromise 
measures, which were to secure the final and perfect 
adjustment of the slavery question. " His object was 



176 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

to save the Union, and he reasoned thus : The Union 
is threatened by the disunion spirit growing up in 
the South. That disunion spirit springs from an 
apprehension that slavery is not safe in the Union. 
The disunion spirit must be disarmed by conces- 
sions calculated to quiet that apprehension. These 
concessions must be such as not to alarm the 
North." ' 

The perfect settlement, which he hoped to patch 
up, provided that California should be speedily 
admitted as a free State, that New Mexico and Utah 
should be organized as territories without any restric- 
tion in regard to slavery, that Texas should receive 
money for the loss of New Mexican territory which 
she claimed, that slavery was not to be abolished in 
the District of Columbia without the consent of Mary- 
land, that the slave-trade in the District should be 
prohibited, that a more effective Fugitive Slave Law 
should be passed and that Congress had no power to 
prevent and hinder the trade in slaves between the 
slave-holding States. 

Thus was the irrepressible conflict to be repressed. 
** We Americans," said Mr. Lowell, " are very fond of 
this glue of compromise. Like so many quack 
cements, it is advertised to make the mended parts 
of the vessel stronger than those which have never 
been broken, but, like them, it will not stand hot 
water." The great conflict in America could be 
settled only when settled right. 

Henry Clay was a patriot and, though a slave- 



Life of Henry Clay," by Carl Schurz, Vol. II., pp. 329, 



THE BATTLE FOR FREEDOM. 1 77 

holder, was a lover of freedom. He did not believe 
that slavery was a blessing. " If it were," he said 
" the principle on which it is maintained would require 
that one portion of the white race should be reduced 
to bondage to serve another portion of the same race, 
when black subjects of slavery could not be obtained ; 
and that in Africa, where they may entertain as great 
preference for their color as we do for ours, they 
would be justified in reducing the white race to 
slavery in order to secure the blessings which that 
state is said to diffuse," But Henry Clay never 
understood clearly, in spite of his preference for free- 
dom, how utterly impossible it was for liberty and 
slavery to keep house together. John Quincy Adams, 
Garrison, Phillips, Sumner, Chase, Lincoln, and Henry 
Ward Beecher perceived that the Union could not 
endure half free and half slave. 

But the chief bulwark of slavery was, after all, the 
National Constitution, and a profound, wise, and pa- 
triotic love of a united country. The South had 
become greatly excited, and disunion talk was rife in 
the capital in 1850. But the compromises granted 
held the Southern statesmen back from making the 
fatal mistake of 1861. As Mr. Blaine has wisely said : 
" In the passions aroused by the agitation over slav- 
ery, Southern men failed to see (what in cooler 
moments they could readily perceive) that the exist- 
ence of the Union and the guarantees of the Consti- 
tution were the shield and safeguard of the South. 
The long contest they had been waging with the 
anti-slavery men of the free States had blinded 
Southern zealots to the essential strength of their po- 
sition so long as their States continued to be members 
12 



178 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

of the Federal Union. But for the constant presence 
of national power, and its constant exercise under 
the provisions of the Constitution, the South would 
have no protection against the anti-slavery assaults 
of the civilized world." * 



1 «< 



Twenty Years of Congress," Vol. I., p. 176. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

THE GLUE OF COMPROMISE, A QUACK CEMENT. 

Mr. Beecher became a great factor in the anti- 
slavery discussion, not through any words spoken 
from his pulpit, but by a masterly article contributed 
in 1850 to The Ifidependent. This religious paper 
had been established in New York two years before, 
and had for its editors men of such conspicuous force 
and ability as Leonard Bacon, Richard S. Storrs, Jr., 
and Joseph P. Thompson. But Mr. Beecher's famous 
Star paper, ''Shall We Compromise ? " published Feb- 
ruary 21, 1850, was a national event. It is well 
known that the dying John C. Calhoun had it read 
to him twice on his sick bed, and said: "The man 
who says that is right. There is no alternative. It 
is liberty or slavery." 

Beecher showed that Clay's compromise bill, liked 
neither by the North nor the South, did not touch the 
seat of the disease. It failed to meet the real issue. 
The radical and age-long feud between the two sys- 
tems and the two policies would rage until one or the 
other achieved a complete victory. "We give Mr. Clay 
sincere praise for desiring peace. We think it worthy 
of his reputation to have declared that he would 
never vote for the extension of slavery. If his com- 
promise had taken that determination as its starting- 
point, he would have come nearer to our ideas of the 



l8o HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

leader which our times and our difficulties demand. 
It is no sportive joust upon which our nation is gaz- 
ing. The shield of the challenger hangs out for no 
blunted lance. Like Ivanhoe, we should have been 
glad had Mr. Clay struck the shield of Bois-Gil- 
bert with the sharp lance-head, importing earnest 
battle. One straightforward speech against the ex- 
tension of slavery, based, not upon political reasons, 
but on the great principles of humanity and justice; 
one glowing appeal to the whole nation to take the 
stand, which he has personally taken, never to vote for 
the extension of slavery on either side of aiiy line; this 
would have been a noble statesmanship, and crowned 
the last years of the revered Sage of Ashland with 
the brightest glory of his life."^ 

The conflict is not the result of any rashness on 
either side. The theory of democracy or the theory 
of aristocracy must rule. The society which honors 
labor and the society which makes it disgraceful 
must be at war. The North represents the common 
weal. " There cannot be a commonwealth of slavery. 
It is class weal and class wealth. The South hope- 
lessly divides society, puts her honors on one side of 
the cleft." "^ 

If the compromises of the Constitution were 
adopted with the expectation that freedom would 
eradicate slavery, it is possible to understand the 
wisdom of the intention at least. But if these com- 
promises were designed to inclose in one permanent 
Government two radically oppugnent theories they 



^ " Patriotic Addresses," p. i68. 

^" Patriotic Addresses," pp. 169, 170. 



THE GLUE OF COMPROMISE, A QUACK CEMENT. l8l 

were evidences of extraordinary folly. '' We should 
as soon look for an agreement by which Christ and 
Belial should jointly undertake to govern this world." 

Mr. Beecher made it plain that the conflict reached 
back into the deeper things of the divine moral order 
and Providence, and that God's truth and Spirit 
must come to animate the National Constitution 
before any peace was possible. The South dis- 
covered that slavery could not live and stand still; 
she claimed the right for extension. " She asked the 
North to be a partner. For every free State she 
demanded one State for slavery. One dark orb must 
be swung into its orbit to groan and travail in pain, 
for every new orb of liberty over which the morning 
stars shall sing for joy."^ 

He denounced the fugitive slave clauses in Mr. 
Clay's Compromise Bill. " Not even the Constitu- 
tion shall make me unjust. If my patriotic sires 
confederated in my behalf that I should maintain 
that instrument, so I will, to the utmost bounds of 
right. But who with power, which even God denies 
to Himself, shall by compact foreordain me to the 
commission of inhumanity and injustice ? I disown 
the act. I repudiate the obligation. Never while I 
have breath will I help any official miscreant in 
his base errand of recapturing a fellow man for 
bondage."^ 

" Ought not Christians, by all the means in their 
power, to preserve the Union ? Yes, by all means 
that are right. But, dear as the Union is, and ought 



* " Patriotic Addresses," p. 172. 
^ '• Patriotic Addresses," p. 173. 



l82 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

to be, whenever it comes between a Christian people 
and their Christian integrity, it becomes a snare. 
The very value of our Union is to be found in those 
principles of justice, liberty, and humanity which 
inspire it. But if by any infernal juggle these princi- 
ples must be yielded up to preserve the Union, then a 
corpse only will be left in our arms, deflowered, life- 
less, worthless. A Union perpetuated by giving way 
to injustice — a Union maintained by obedience to 
the desires of slavery — is but a compact of violence. 
We emphasize these things because the long-continued 
cries of politicians have produced among sober 
Christian men an unquestioned and undisturbed con- 
viction that no evil can be so great as the dissolution 
of our Union. There are many evils infinitely 
greater. The loss of a national conscience is greater. 
The loss of public humanity is greater. And indiffer- 
ence to the condition of millions of miserable crea- 
tures, whose degradation, vices, ignorance, and animal- 
ism plead with our conscience in their behalf ; this 
would be an unspeakably greater evil. So long as we 
can maintain the Union on terms which allow us to 
act with a free conscience, with humanity unviolated, 
we shall count no sacrifice too dear to maintain it. 
But religion and humanity are a price too dear to pay 
even for the Union! " ^ 

In this powerful paper Mr. Beecher proclaimed that 
there was in the country a Conscience Party, augment- 
ing in the North, some day to be organized against 
the national inhumanity. Speaking for that party, 
he said: " We can bear much, but we cannot and 



* ** Patriotic Addresses," pp. 173-174. 



THE GLUE OF COMPROMISE, A QUACK CEMENT. 183 

will not bear the guilt of slavery. We regard it 
as epitomizing every offense which man can commit 
against man. It takes liberty from those to whom 
God gave it as the right of all rights. It forbids all 
food, either for the understanding or the heart. It 
takes all honesty from the conscience. It takes its 
defense from virtue, and gives all authority into the 
hands of lustful or pecuniary cupidity. It scorns the 
family, and invades it whenever desire or the want 
of money prevail, with the same coolness with which 
a drover singles out a heifer, or a butcher strikes 
down a bulLock. These are not the accidents of 
slavery. They are its legitimate fruits." ^ 

Compromises of the Constitution, made on the 
theory that slavery is to die out, are tolerable, but 
compromises made on the theory that slavery is 
national and perpetual are monstrosities. We most 
solemnly declare, by our belief in humanity, by 
our hopes in religion, by our faith in Christ, that we 
will cut every cord of oppression whose force is 
derived from us. And if, in so doing, men choose to 
interpose the Constitution, upon their heads be the 
blame. Palsied be that hand and blasted those lips 
which shall make our Constitution, ordained for 
Freedom, the instrument of bondage and cruelty."^ 

He announced his programme of open hostility to 
every party or measure friendly to the interests of 
slavery and made the prophecy that the time was to 
come "when men will look back upon this system as 
we now look back upon the dungeons and tribunals 



^ " Patriotic Addresses," pp. 174-175, 
^ " Patriotic Addresses," p. 175. 



184 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

of the Inquisition. In that day, many a man will 
deny his parentage and forswear the ancestors who 
either forged fetters for the slave, or more meanly 
blew the bellows for those who wrought at the anvil 
of oppression. May my children to the latest genera- 
tion, in looking back to my example, take courage, and 
strike home for Liberty and Humanity." ^ 

He announced his eternal hostility to compromises 
which seek for peace rather than justice. He an- 
nounced his purpose to abide by the Union. " No 
vandal outrage shall our hands commit. We shall 
honor it by obedient lives, consecrate it by our 
prayers, purify it from the dross of injustice, and give 
to it such foundations of Right as shall hold it stead- 
fast amid all the revolutionary concussions of our 
day." And then with prophetic insight into a pos- 
sible civil war he said: "■ If there be those who cannot 
abide with the Union because it is pure and religious, 
just and humane, let them beware of that tumultuous 
scene into which they purpose to leap. . . . But 
if our Charter Oak is to be dismembered, God be 
thanked that its roots are planted in the soil of Free- 
dom. There they will spread; its trunk and its 
mightiest branches will abide. The sun and the soil 
that nourished its infancy yet remain to repair what 
time and storms may mutilate. Beneath its shadow 
the poor and oppressed shall find shelter." ^ 

The battle in the United States Congress over 
Clay's Compromise panacea was one of the most 
memorable in American annals. Besides Mr. Clay 



' " Patriotic Addresses," p. 176. 
^ •' Patriotic Addresses," p. 177. 



THE GLUE OF COMPROMISE, A QUACK CEMENT. 185 

there were in the Senate at that time Webster, Cass, 
Benton, Calhoun, Stephen A. Douglas, Jefferson 
Davis, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Han- 
nibal Hamlin, John P. Hale, James M. Mason, Samuel 
Houston. " At no time before or since in the history of 
the Senate," wrote Mr. Blaine, '^has its membership 
been so illustrious, its weight of character and ability 
so great. The period marked the meeting and divid- 
ing line between two generations of statesmen. The 
eminent men who had succeeded the leaders of the 
Revolutionary era were passing away, but the most 
brilliant of their number were still lingering, unabated 
in natural force, resplendent in personal fame. Their 
successors in public responsibility, if not their equals 
in public regard and confidence, were already upon 
the stage preparing for, and destined to act in, the 
bloodiest and most memorable of civil struggles." ^ ' 
Mr. Webster's yth of March speech excited intense 
hostility among the anti-slavery Whigs of the North- 
ern States. Many old friends abandoned him, and 
the Conscience Party of the North was aroused to a 
more strenuous activity against the slave-power. The 
Fugitive Slave Bill became law and was put into 
execution. " The plantation barons were sulky. Their 
biped ' property ' had mastered enough astronomy to 
distinguish the North Star, and had mustered enough 
manhood to run for it. Meanwhile, large sections 
of the Free States covertly cooperated with the fugi- 
tives, and openly refused to return them to the 
house of bondage. The scene was of bewildering 
confusion — dizzy as a dance of dervishes." * 



^ " Twenty Years of Congress," p. go. 

2 Carlos Martyn's " Life of Wendell Phillips," p. 224. 



1 86 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Whittier sang: 

The evil days have come, — the poor 

Are made a prey ; 
Bar up the hospitable door, 
Put out the firelights, point no more 

The wanderer's way. 

For Pity now is crime ; the chain 

Which binds our States 
Is melted at her hearth in twain, 
Is rusted by her tears' soft rain : 

Close up her gates. 

Mr. Beecher was, of course, in rebellion against the 
atrocious law which denied trial by jury, opportunity 
on the part of the accused to summon witnesses in his 
own defense, or a hearing before a competent judge. 
" Dumb, undefended, his destiny at the mercy of an}'' 
accuser, and of a commissioner possibly ignorant and 
possibly vicious, the accused was consigned to a state 
worse than death." ^ 

An underground railroad, designed to facilitate 

the escape of fugitives from bondage, was actively 

I manned the whole distance from Mason and Dixon's 

' line to the Canadian border. On the other hand, 

colored people at the North who were free were often 

kidnapped and hurried into Southern slavery. 

Those were days of hot feeling. Mr. Beecher, in a 
Star paper that was published in October, 1850, said: 
" If in God's providence fugitives ask bread or 
shelter, raiment or conveyance from us, my own 
children shall lack bread before they; my own flesh 



" Biography," p. 239. 



THE GLUE OF COMPROMISE, A QUACK CEMENT. 187 

will Sting with cold ere they shall lack raiment; I 
will both shelter them, conceal them, or speed their 
flight, and while they are under my shelter or my 
convoy they shall be to me as my own flesh and 
blood." The principle of his action is thus described: 
*' Every citizen must obey a law which inflicts injury 
upon his person, estate, and civil privilege, until 
legally redressed; but no citizen is bound to obey the 
law which commands him to inflict injury upon an- 
other. We must endure^ but never couwiit wrong." 

" Our policy for the future is plain. All the natural 
laws of God are warring upon slavery. We have only 
to let the process go on. Let slavery alone. Let it 
go to seed. Hold it to its own natural fruit. Cause 
it to abide by itself. Cut off every branch that hangs 
beyond the wall, every root that spreads. Shut it up to 
itself and let it alone. We do not ask to interfere with 
the internal policy of a single State by congressional 
enactments: we will not ask to take one guarantee 
from the institution; we only ask that a line be drawn 
about it; that an insuperable bank be cast up; that 
it be fixed and for ever settled that slavery must find 
no new sources, new fields, new prerogatives, but that 
it must abide in its place, subject to all legitimate 
changes which will be brought upon it by the spirit 
of a nation essentially democratic, by schools taught 
by enlightened men, by colleges sending annually 
into every profession thousands bred to justice and 
hating its reverse, by Churches preaching a Gospel 
that has always heralded civil liberty, by manufac- 
tories which always thrive best when the masses are 
free and refined, and, therefore, have their wants 
multiplied by free agriculture and free commerce," 



1 88 HP.NRY WARD BEFX'HER. 

Mr. Beecher's policy, thus outlined, while coming 
far short of the absolute justice demanded by the 
Abolitionists, was substantially the policy which the 
Republican party was destined to inaugurate and 
pursue. The difficulty with this policy, however, was 
that it could not possibly be executed without arous- 
ing the South to fiercer hostilities. By its very nature 
slavery must expand or die. Liberty might, as Mr. 
Beecher well said, if left alone, be always a match for 
oppression, but under the circumstances in America 
the South, believing in slavery and taught by Cal- 
houn to believe also in secession, was steadily making 
ready, with the continued growth of this anti-slavery 
movement in the North, for the great Civil War. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

A LIGHT IN America's dark age. 

Without any personal bitterness, Mr. Beecher con- 
tinued his fearless agitation. One result of it was 
this, that personal abuse was showered upon him 
without stint. As the years went by, the pro-slavery 
feeling became so bitter in the North that Mr. Beecher 
" naturally received the largest share of abuse from 
pro-slavery journals, and incurred the lion's part of 
mercantile, commercial, and social displeasure." * 
His name became a hated name ; he aroused all sorts 
of opposition, and it penetrated all grades of society, 
from the highest to the lowest. It was evident that 
if hatred could ever find a weak point in his armor, 
if ever personal scandal should attach itself to his 
reputation, there would be wide and eager credulity 
on the part of great masses of his own countrymen. 
There were ecclesiastical circles, large and influential, 
where, for many years, his name was mentioned only 
to be abused. He was lampooned in Harper's Weekly^ 
which printed a full-page cartoon of him declining to 
administer communion to Washington because the 
Father of his Country owned slaves. 

In the time of the struggle for freedom in Kansas, 



* Howard's " Life of Henry Ward Beecher," p. 243. 



190 HENRY WARD BEECHEP 

Plymouth Church and its pastor were the objects of 
intense malignity on the part of the roughs in New 
York and Brooklyn; and one Sunday evening, in 
1856, a company of " lewd fellows of the baser sort" 
entered Plymouth Church for the purpose of cleaning 
out the accursed Abolition nest. A large police force, 
however, were present, and fifty gentlemen, including 
some of the trustees of the Church, armed themselves 
with revolvers, and the hostile demonstration was 
confined to the muttering of curses and threats 
against all negro-worshipers as the would-be mob 
passed into the street again. 

A fearless and powerful speaker, with a great 
Church behind him sympathetic with his utterances, 
dealing vigorous blows at every form of iniquity, 
p*rejudice, and sluggish conservatism, Mr. Beecher 
became more hated than any other of the anti- 
slavery leaders. Garrison and Phillips would have 
excited perhaps intenser malignity, but they were 
deemed by many such extremists and fanatics, 
and their following was so much smaller and their 
connection with the Church so slender, that they 
escaped some of the bitter contumely which smote 
the popular pastor of Plymouth Church. " When- 
ever he spoke, the size of the church or hall alone 
decided the number of hearers. Without ambition, 
without self-seeking, with a simple, earnest desire to 
do his work as God revealed it to him, unrasped by 
hatreds, he had come to a place and leadership as 
broad and high as there was in the land." * In daily 
augmenting numbers the friends of freedom gathered 



* " Biography," p. 245. 



A LIGHT IN AMERICAS DARK AGE. IQI 

about him. The service which he rendered the great 
cause cannot easily be estimated, and has never been 
overestimated. 

One of the bravest services which he rendered was 
his championship of the right of free speech when 
Wendell Phillips was prevented by the mob from 
uttering his convictions in New York. This was in 
May, 1850. The meetings of the American Anti- 
Slavery Society in the Broadway Tabernacle, famous 
for the revival services which had been held in it by 
President Charles G. Finney, had been broken up. 
Threats had preceded the coming of the leading 
Abolitionists to this anniversary. " The air was full 
of coming violence, of which a truly satanic Scotch- 
man, James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York 
Herald^ was the prime invoker." ^ 

As an example of the pro-slavery newspaper utter- 
ances of that time, and as a reminder of the Dark 
Ages of American history, it may be well to recall 
one of the editorial utterances of that leading New 
York journal. " Never, in the time of the French 
Revolution and blasphemous atheism, was there more 
malevolence and unblushing wickedness avowed 
than by this same Garrison. Indeed, he surpasses 
Robespierre and his associates, for he has no design 
of building up. His only object is to destroy."^ 

Captain Rynders and his ruffians had succeeded in 
breaking up the Abolitionists' meeting in the Taber- 
nacle before Wendell Phillips could speak. They had 



1 " Life of William Lloyd Garrison Told by His Children," Vol. 
in. p. 281. 

Life of William Lloyd Garrison," Vol. IIL, p. 283. 



192 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

also been shut out from another meeting-place. But 
the Graham Institute in Brooklyn was secured for 
Wendell Phillips by a friend, William A. Hall, who 
was a fervent Abolitionist. Mr. Beecher was to pray 
at this meeting. A committee of the Institute, how- 
ever, withdrew the invitation on account of the 
intense excitement. Was free discussion ended for 
Brooklyn as well as New York ? Beecher saved the 
priceless boon for his own city and helped to save it 
for the Nation. 

Mr. Henry C. Bowen encouraged him to offer to 
Phillips the use of Plymouth Church. Beecher went 
to the trustees, man by man, and most of them gladly 
gave written permission. One or two were inclined 
to withhold it. He made it a personal matter, how- 
ever, and said: *' You and I will break if you don't 
give me this permission," and they signed. The 
audience in attendance was immense, and detectives 
were there in disguise to preserve order. *' I was 
amazed," wrote Mr. Beecher to Oliver Johnson, *' at 
the unagitated agitator — so calm, so fearless, so inci- 
sive — every word a bull ,t. I never heard a more 
effective speech than Mr. Phillips's that night. He 
seemed inspired, and played with his audience (turbu- 
lent, of course), as Gulliver might with the Lillipu- 
tians. He had the dignity of Pitt, the vigor of Fox, 
the wit of Sheridan, the satire of Junius — and a 
grace and music all his own. Then for the first time 
did Plymouth Church catch an echo of those match- 
less tones. I mean it shall not be the last time."^ 

Another form of persecution, in these days of 



1 " Life of Wendell Phillips," by Carlos Martyn, p. 231. 



A LIGHT IN AMERICA S DARK AGE 193 

slavery madness and Union-saving patriotism, aimed 
to " boycott " Northern merchants and manufacturers 
who had anti-slavery tendencies. A black-list of New 
York " Abolition " merchants was made out by a com- 
mittee, and the South was told to withdraw its 
patronage from these destroyers of the Union. Mr. 
Henry C. Bowen was on this list, and Mr. Beecher 
wrote for him a card which became famous, and was 
a battle-cry for independent anti-slavery business 
men; " My goods are for sale, but not my principles." 

Mr. Beecher, like Curtis and Phillips, earnestly 
fought the un-Christian ostracism which banished 
negroes from churches, lecture-halls, theatres, first- 
class railway cars, gentlemen's cabins, and the white 
omnibuses of Fulton Ferry. Frederick Douglass was 
invited by him to Plymouth Church, and to a seat on 
the platform by the pastor. Mr. Beecher would not 
ride, and urged his friends not to ride, in the convey- 
ances placarded with the words, "Colored people not 
allowed to ride in this omnibus." In a fortnight's 
time the placards were gone. 

In the teeth of newspaper threats of violence, he 
championed the right of ministers to use their pul- 
pits as batteries against slavery. Fortifying himself 
with materials gathered from Southern sources, he 
made a tremendous onslaught, showing, from South- 
ern testimony, that slaves had no Bible to read, no 
family altar, and were practically heathen in a 
Christian country. " It is vain to tell us that hun- 
dreds of thousands of slaves are Church members. 
Does that save women from the lust of their owners ? 
Does it save their children from being sold ? Does it 
save parents from separation? In the shameless. pro- 

13 



194 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

cessions every week from the Atlantic to the Gulf are 
to be found slaves ordained to preach the Gospel, 
members of Churches, baptized children, Sunday- 
school scholars carefully catechized, full of Gospel 
texts, fat and plump for market. What is religion 
worth to a slave, except as a consolation from despair 
when the hand that breaks to him the bread of com- 
munion on Sunday takes the price of his blood and 
bones on Monday, and bids him godspeed on his pil- 
grimage from old Virginia tobacco fields to the cotton 
plantations of Alabama ? " 

He showed that slavery at the North was on the 
basis of the Hebrew law, while slavery at the South 
had adopted the Roman civil law as the basis of its 
code. In his speech before the American and Foreign 
Anti-Slavery Society, delivered in New York on the 
6th day of May, 1851, he discussed the relations of 
slavery to Christianity with the most telling and 
forceful eloquence: " It was Lord Brougham, I think, 
who said where the slave-trade was so profitable as to 
pay three hundred per cent., not all the navies of the 
globe could stop it; and when slavery began to pay 
enormous profits, not all the power of Christianity 
could stop it, especially when ministers of the Gospel 
were found to step in and baptize it, and call it 
Christian." ^ 

Discussing the Hebrew bond service he said, that 
the Hebrew master was obliged to give his bondman 
a religious education. '* Now in our modern system 
of education there is first the family, and then the 
school, and the magazine, and newspaper. But then 



*'* Patriotic Addresses," p. 179. 



A LIGHT IN AMERICAS DARK AGE. 1 95 

there were only five books, called the Pentateuch, 
and the whole system of education was comprised in 
instruction in these five books; and in these every 
slave must be educated If the same regulation was 
carried out now, it would require the Southern slave- 
owner to send his slave to the academy, and then put 
him through some Northern college, and graduate 
him, before he tied him down to the plough or hoe 
of the plantation. That was the Hebrew idea of 
slavery." ' 

Amid much hissing, soon drowned by cheers, he 
said: " At the South adultery among the slaves is not 
held to be a reason for Church discipline. I am glad 
to see some sense of shame for this. The public con- 
science is being aroused. Do you know that at the 
South in marrying slaves the minister leaves out the 
words, ' What God has joined together let no man 
put asunder ' ? It must be left out, for perhaps in a 
few weeks a husband will be separated from a wife 
and sent to another plantation, and then if he chooses 
he can take another wife, and if he is a member of 
the Church it does not hurt his standing, and then 
another and another, till perhaps he may have twenty 
wives, and still his letter of recommendation from 
one Church to another is good as ever." A voice — 
*' T/iere are fueii in New York who have twenty wives" 
" I am sorr)?- for them. I go in for their immediate 
emancipation."^ [Great cheering.] 

He attacked with unsparing vigor the Fugitive 
Slave Law, among other reasons because it tended to 



* " Patriotic Addresses," p. 182. 

2" Patriotic Addresses," pp. 184, 185. 



196 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

make an impassable gulf between the North and 
South, because of its inhumanity, because it required 
what was essentially wrong, because it stirred up ill 
blood, because it abridged the liberty of free men, 
and because bad laws are treason to good govern- 
ment. He replied to the Biblical argument for send- 
ing back fugitive slaves, founded on the return of 
Onesimus as follows: " There are two ways of send- 
ing fugitives back into slavery. One is the way Paul 
sent back the slave Onesimus. Now, if people will 
adopt that way I will not object. In the first placCj, 
he instructed him in Christianity and led him to 
become a Christian; then he wrote a letter and sent 
it by Onesimus himself. Now, I should like to see 

Marshal , or Marshal somebody else, of this city, 

send back a slave in this way. In the first place the 
Marshal would take him and teach him the cate- 
chism, and pray with him, and convert him into 
brotherly love; then the slave goes of his own free 
will to his master and walks into the house, and with 
his broad, black, beaming face, says: 'How d'ye do, 
my brother ? and how d'ye do, my sister ? ' " ^ 

To this sort of argument there was no reply. 

A well-known illustration of his faculty of instan- 
taneous repartee claims record in connection with 
this speech. He said: "The slave is made just good 
enough to be a good slave and no more. It is a 
penitentiary offense to teach him." Here some one 
in the corner of the gallery yelled out: " It's a 
lie!" "Well, whether it's a penitentiary offense or 
not, I shall not argue with the gentleman in the 



2 " Biography," pp. 252, 253. 



A LIGHT IN AMERICA S DARK AGE. I97 

corner as doubtless he has been there and ought to 
know." 

In closing the speech he made a magnificent appeal 
to conscience as the safeguard of republican institu- 
tions. " Human nature is a poor affair — man is but 
a pithy, porous, flabby substance, till you put con- 
science into him; and as for building a republic on 
men who do not hold to the right of private con- 
science, who will not follow their own consciences 
rather than that of any priest or public, you might as 
well build a Custom House in Wall Street on a foun- 
dation of cotton-wool! But the nation that regards 
Conscience more than anything else, above all customs 
and all laws, is, like New England, with its granite 
hills, immovable and invincible; and the nation that 
does not regard conscience is a mere base of sand, 
and quicksand, too, at that. If you want this country 
to be like Turkey, or Egypt, or Algiers, give up the 
rights of private conscience, and you will have it so 
soon enough. 

Yes! the time will come when, on reading the 
epitaph of a man, which records that here lies A. B.^ 
author of a learned commentary on this or that book, 
and defender of the doctrine that the people must 
give up their consciences to magistrate and priest, the 
people will lift up their hands in astonishment and 
exclaim: * God have mercy on his soul.' " ^ 

There is a majestic severity in this speech, spoken 
by one of the most tender-hearted and sympathetic 
of men. He tried hard to calm the natural expres- 
sion of his indignation, but sometimes it burst 



1 << 



Patriotic Addresses," p. 194. 



198 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

forth in thunderbolts of righteous wrath. " It is 
with a sense of shame that we see strong words for 
oppression granted an unapologized liberty to walk 
up and down as they will; while he who speaks for 
Freedom must rake up his ardor under the ashes of 
a tame propriety, and stand to answer for want of a 
Gospel spirit, if indignation at double and treble 
wrongs do sometimes give forth a bolt! Neverthe- 
less, we hope; we trust; we pray; and hoping, trust- 
ing, and praying, we soothe ourselves in such thoughts 
as these: ' From this shame, too, thou shalt go forth, 
O world! God, who, unwearied sitting on the circle 
of the heavens, hath beheld and heard the groanings 
and travailings of pain until now, and caused Time 
to destroy them one by one, shall ere long destroy 
thee, thou abhorred and thrice damnable oppression 
cancerously eating the breast of Liberty.' " 

" And if in this day, after notable examples of 
heroic men in heroic ages, when life itself often paid 
for fidelity, the pulpit is to be mined and sapped by 
insincere friends and insidious enemies, and learn to 
mix the sordid prudence of business with the sonor- 
ous and thrice heroic counsels of Christ, then, O my 
soul, be not thou found conspiring with this league of 
iniquity; that so, when in that august day of retribu- 
tion God shall deal punishment in flaming measures 
to all hireling and coward ministers, thou shalt not go 
down, under double-bolted thunders, lower than mis- 
creant Sodom or thrice polluted Gomorrah! " ^ Have 
we not here a noble and unconscious echo of some of 
the more sonorous passages of Milton's prose ? 



Biography" p. 252. 



A LIGHT IN AMERICA S DARK AGE. I99 

Such was the prevailing disposition among large 
sections of the Northern people, including many- 
Northern ministers, to do the will of the slave-mas- 
ters, that it is not surprising that the people of the 
North were deemed cowards, and poltroons, and in- 
feriors. In truth this opinion was not uprooted from 
the Southern mind till the Union armies confronted 
the slaveholders* Confederacy. Some Northern men 
went further than the South in their apologies for 
slavery. James Freeman Clark told of a Boston 
friend who, in the home of the Marshalls, in Ken- 
tucky, spoke in favor of " the institution." Mrs. Mar- 
shall, who was a slave-owner, replied : " It will not 
do, sir, to defend slavery in this family. The Mar- 
shalls and the Birneys have always been Abolition- 
ists ! " Mr. Beecher owned an Episcopal prayer 
book, in the front of which was Ary Scheffer's pic- 
ture of Christ healing and blessing the unfortunate 
ones, the Christus Consolator. But the picture of a 
slave among the other suffering ones, lifting his hands 
in appeal, was cut out, so that it might be free from 
any taint of Abolitionism ! 



CHAPTER XIX. 

THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT CONTINUES. 

The great excitements of 1850 were followed by 
something of a calm in the succeeding year, a calm 
to be disturbed by the publication of Mrs. Stowe's 
"Uncle Tom's Cabin." People were settling down 
into a sullen and stubborn feeling that the Union 
must be preserved at any price. The peril of dissolu- 
tion had apparently been lessened by the passing of a 
series of bills following the line of Clay's compro- 
mise measures, and the great conservative instincts 
of the country were banded in selfish and unholy 
alliance against any further agitation of the slavery 
question. Mobs were ready to put down free speech; 
the tone of the press was virulent; the anti-slavery 
spirit must be crushed if possible. The South, how- 
ever, made the serious mistake of pushing her right 
to capture and return fugitive slaves. 

In December, 1851, Kossuth came to America as the 
nation's guest. He represented European liberty, the 
struggle of the Hungarian people against military 
and imperial despotism. With his marvelous powers 
of eloquent speech he gained an enthusiastic hearing 
and reception from the American people. By Mr. 
Beecher's invitation he spoke in Plymouth Church 
and ten thousand dollars was thus secured for the 



THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT CONTINUES. 201 

cause of Hungarian freedom. Mr. Beecher in an ef- 
fective Star paper showed how incongruous it was for 
the nation to honor the champion of Hungarian lib- 
erty and at the same time tread down oppressively 
the more helpless slave on its own soil. 

In 1852, Webster and Clay, the giants of the struggle 
to save the Union by moral compromises, passed 
away; Charles Sumner entered the Senate, a man 
with whom compromise on the slavery question was 
an impossibility, and Franklin Pierce was elected to 
the Presidency. His predecessor, Millard Fillmore, 
will always be chiefly remembered as the signer of 
the infamous Fugitive Slave Bill. 

" Personally, privately, I honor Mr. Fillmore ; but 
as a public man he had no political conscience. . . . 
He gave up Liberty to be crucified between Southern 
slavery and Northern mammon ; and then washed his 
hands, and said, ' I am innocent of the blood of this 
just person.' " ^ 

Franklin Pierce, though achieving a great victory 
at the polls, is likely to be pleasantly remembered 
only as the friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

The Whigs and Democrats had both agreed to ac- 
cept the Compromise Measures as the final settle- 
ment of the slavery question. But both the great 
political parties together, however stern their oppo- 
sition to practical Christianity, could not destroy the 
tenacious life of the anti-slavery movement. Speak- 
ing of the politicians who wondered at the persist- 
ence of the spirit of revolt against slavery, Mr. Beecher 
said: '' It is no fanaticism that animates or controls 



1 •< 



Plymouth Pulpit Sermons," Vol. II., p. 15. 



202 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

it, it is the religious principle that is the secret of the 
strength of this cause; it is because Jesus Christ is 
alive, and there are Jesus Christ men who count this 
cause dearer than their lives." ^ 

In many respects he was the greatest moral leader 
whom God has given to American political life. Al- 
most always he was in the vanguard and thus exposed 
to constant attack. A lover of peace, he was continu- 
ally at war. There have been many other men who 
were far greater masters of intellectual and formal 
logic, though few men have surpassed him in the 
power of rapid and heated argumentation before a 
large assembly; but no other American of his time 
grasped more firmly, or applied more wisely to the 
problems then in hand, the principles of moral logic. 
The action of this man, who had no fears, was deter- 
mined by his moral convictions. This made him a 
great reformer. 

Seeing with the prophetic clearness of a Savonarola 
the position which a man dedicated to righteousness 
ought to occupy, he was in his place, and that was 
almost always where the battle was thickest. The 
weapons which he saw fit to use were not merely 
those of " sweetness and light." Of a certain class of 
apologists for slavery he had said in 1850: " They 
hang themselves up in the shambles of every Southern 
market; they trust the pliant good nature of the North, 
and are only fearful lest they should fail to be mean 
enough to please the South." Of course, the enemies 
of such a man hungered for an opportunity to pull 
him down and they never failed to improve it. Any- 



1 " Biography," p. 257. 



THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT CONTINUES. 203 

thing against him which could be twisted into the 
appearance of moral obliquity was seized as eagerly 
in 1852 as in 1872. 

In " Uncle Tom's Cabin," Mrs. Stowe, after describ- 
ing the selling of a child from its mother's arms, took 
occasion to reprobate the Christian ministers who 
taught that the institution of slavery " has no evils 
but such as are inseparable from any other relations 
in social and domestic life." Dr. Joel Parker, of 
Hartford, to whom this sentiment was ascribed by 
Mrs. Stowe, and who had not contradicted it, though 
it had been printed in many newspapers, both Ameri- 
can and English, threatened to sue Mrs. Stowe for 
libel. On account of 'the aroused moral feeling in 
the North, it was getting uncomfortable to have one's 
apologies for slavery exposed. 

Mr. Beecher attempted to act as a mediator and 
peacemaker, with " a confidence which was born of 
sincerity and inexperience." He found both willing 
to write letters of explanation which modified the 
positions of each. Over the signatures of Dr. Parker 
and Mrs. Stowe, he published both letters and went 
West on a lecturing trip, vainly thinking that he had 
done a good service. " Instead of making peace be- 
tween them, he found, as result of his labors, their 
differences increased and embittered, and himself 
charged with forgery both of letter and signature." ^ 

A fierce and bitter attack was made upon him along 
the whole line of pro-slavery conservatism, and his 
downfall was surely expected. Mr. Beecher was to 
be routed from his entrenchments. But the poisoned 



I «< 



Biography," p. 260. 



204 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

arrow met an impenetrable shield. "The overthrow 
was not accomplished, and he stood, at the end, fully- 
vindicated from all the aspersions of his enemies." ^ 

Nothing in his whole life had given him deeper 
sorrow than this event; he had labored honestly to 
avert what seemed to him a shame and disgrace, and 
found himself exposed to every form of contumely. 
During all this painful experience he felt that not a 
single promise of God had been left unfulfilled. He 
said: ''I know that it has been a better sermon to me 
than was ever preached by human lips." And again 
he wrote: " Had I ever doubted the promises of God 
I should now find every shadow swept away ; and I 
surely count the little annoyance which this perver- 
sion of honor and truth in these unprincipled men 
has caused me not worthy to be mentioned in the 
joy which I have had in being folded into the very 
bosom of my Saviour." And again he wrote: "It has 
pleased God to so graciously stand by me in this 
fiercest attack of my life that if every friend in the 
world had abandoned me I should not have been 
alone." ^ 

Thus he was unconsciously girding himself for the 
bitterer experiences, the sorer trials, of his later life. 

It was not merely the American friends of slavery 
that Mr. Beecher attacked. When John Mitchell, 
the " great Irish patriot," had been warmly wel- 
comed in New York, and had dared to write that it 
was neither a crime, nor a wrong, nor even a pecca- 
dillo, to hold, buy, and sell slaves, and keep them to 



^ " Biography," p. 262. 
^ " Biography," p, 262. 



THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT CONTINUES. 205 

their work by flogging, Mr. Beecher gave this spuri- 
ous apostle of liberty such a whipping as few men 
ever more richly deserved. " Once you stood like 
some great oak whose wide circumference was lifted 
up above all the pastures, the glory of all beholders, 
and a covert for a thousand timid singing birds! Now 
you lie at full length along the ground, with mighty 
ruptured roots ragged and upturned to Heaven, with 
broken boughs and despoiled leaves ! Never again 
shall husbandmen predict spring from your swelling 
buds ! Never again shall God's singing birds of lib- 
erty come down through all the heavenly air to rest 
themselves on your waving top ! Fallen ! Uprooted ! 
Doomed to the axe and the hearth." ^ 

The perpetual compromises of 1850 lasted about 
four years ! Liberty was getting the advantage in 
the battle for the possession of the American conti- 
nent. The only area for the expansion of slavery 
lay in the direction of the Territories of Kansas and 
Nebraska and the slave-masters set their eager eyes 
on that fair domain. What Lowell had sung at an 
earlier time was true then: 

"Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood, 
Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the 

earth with blood. 
Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day, 
Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey ; 
Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children 

play ? " 

The great Kansas fight was on, when Stephen A. 
Douglas, in January, 1854, in reporting to the United 



Biography," p. 266. 



2o6 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

States Senate a bill for the organizing of the new 
Territories, brought in the proposition to repeal 
what for thirty-four years had been held to be almost 
as sacred as the Constitution itself, the Missouri 
Compromise. According to this proposition slavery 
was no longer to be excluded as a matter of course 
north of the prescribed line, but, under the theory of 
squatter sovereignty the inhabitants of the new Ter- 
ritories were to decide for themselves what should 
be their domestic institutions! The South was deter- 
mined to make slavery national, and Douglas's prop- 
osition gave them a new field where they might 
wage successful fight. 

Flaming indignation burned in liberty-loving hearts 
throughout the North. A protest was signed by three 
thousand New England clergymen against the action 
which Douglas proposed. " We protest against the 
repeal of the Missouri Compromise as a great moral 
wrong; as a breach of faith eminently unjust to the 
moral principles of the community and subversive of 
all confidence in national engagements; as a measure 
full of danger to the peace and even the existence of 
our beloved Union, and exposing us to the righteous 
judgments of the Almighty." In the storm of oppo- 
sition to this repeal both the Democratic and Whig 
parties were ultimately broken up. 



CHAPTER XX. 

THE PILGRIMS ON THE KANSAS PRAIRIES. 

Mr. Beecher's activity with voice and pen was 
constant and intense. In a Star paper on " The 
Crisis" he appealed to the people to roll their thunder 
of indignation against the graceless and recreant 
herd in Congress who were planning this perfidy 
and outrage. He urged individuals, families, and 
Churches to pour their petitions into Washington. 
'' In this solemn hour of peril, when all men's hearts 
sink within them, we have an appeal to those citizens 
who rebuked us for our fears^in 1850. 

'* Did you not declare that that should be a 
finality ? Did you not say that by a concession of 
conscience we should thereafter have peace ? 

*' Is this the peace ? Is this the fulfillment of your 
promise ? Is not this the very sequence which we 
told you would come? That Compromise was a 
ball of frozen rattlesnakes. You turned them in your 
hands then with impunity. We warned and besought. 
We protested and adjured. You persisted in bring- 
ing them into the dwelling. You laid them down 
before the fire. Now where are they ? They are 
crawling all around. Their fangs are striking death 
into every precious interest of liberty ! It is your 
work." ' 



1 •' 



Biography," p. 274. 



208 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

"The North is both bound and asleep. It is bound 
with bonds of unlawful compromise. You, ministers 
of Christ, held her limbs, while the gaunt and worthy- 
minions of oppression moved about, twisting inextric- 
able cords about her hands and feet; or, like Saul, 
stood by, holding the garments of those that slew the 
martyr. The poor Northern conscience has been like 
a fly upon a spider's web. Her statesm.en, and not a 
few of her ministers, have rolled up the struggling 
insect, singing fainter and fainter, with webs of soph- 
istry, till it now lies a miserable, helpless victim and 
slavery is crawling up to suck its vital blood." ^ 

When the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was 
accomplished in September 1854, the battle was at 
once transferred from the halls in Washington to the 
prairies of Kansas. Then was witnessed a movement 
which showed that the spirit of the Revolution, the 
spirit which settled New England, the spirit which 
sent the Mayflower across the Atlantic was not ex- 
tinguished. Whittier sang of the Kansas emigrants: 

"We cross the prairie as of old 
The Pilgrims crossed the sea, 
To make the West, as they the East, 
The homestead of the free." 

" We go to rear a. wall of men 
On Freedom's southern line, 
And plant beside the cotton-tree 
The rugged northern pine." 

By terrorism, fraudulent elections, and every kind 
of perfidy and violence, the emissaries of slavery, 
headed by the acting Vice-President of the United 



" Biography," p. 275. 



THE PILGRIMS ON THE KANSAS PRAIRIES. 209 

States, Senator Atchison, sought to gain and main- 
tain possession of the new territory. A fraudulent 
legislature, backed by United States Courts, mar- 
shals, and soldiers, strove to keep freedom out of 
Kansas, Monstrous laws were enacted by the villain- 
ous legislative body called togetherby the Lecompton 
Constitution. The friends of freedom needed to be 
active. The purpose to rescue the virgin territory 
from the despoiler became a holy enthusiasm in the 
North. Emigrant societies were organized to redeem 
Kansas. 

Up-bearing, like the Ark of old, 

The Bible in our van. 

We go to test the truth of God 

Against the fraud of man. 

In July, 1854, the beautiful town of Lawrence, 
destined to achieve a splendid fame in the annals of 
liberty and learning, was founded by noble men from 
New England. The free-State settlers rallied about 
the strong leaders, and the Topeka Constitution was 
adopted in October, 1855. Then followed the bloody 
Kansas war, which was to fire the heart of one grim 
old Puritan, and nerve him to strike the preliminary 
blow, by which the slave system in America w^as at 
last to fall. 

Not satisfied with the effort to capture Kansas, 
slavery sought also to buy Cuba from Spain, and, if 
this were not possible, threatened to tear that Pearl 
of the Antilles from the Spanish Crown. In 1857 
came the infamous Dred Scott decision of the United 
States Supreme Court, which gave the slaveholder 
the right to take his human property into any part of 
the United States territory. The anti-slavery leaders 

14 



2IO HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

felt, as never before, that the Constitution was being 
perverted from the intent of its founders, while the 
Abolitionists became more certain than ever that the 
Constitution was a covenant with death and a league 
with hell. 

These years were among the most critical in the 
anti-slavery struggle. Mr. Beecher felt the supreme 
importance of the contest, and discerned that a great 
crisis must be sternly met. When the Missouri Com- 
promise was repealed, and the doctrine of squatter 
sovereignty promulgated, he saw immediately that 
every effort must be put forth to strengthen freedom 
in Kansas. With all the fiery zeal, begotten of intense 
conviction, he flung his whole force into this fight. 
Up and down the land he lectured, and in Plymouth 
Church and elsewhere, as he spoke for freedom, he 
collected money to supply the settlers in Kansas both 
with Bibles and rifles. ^' Some of the rifles," it is 
said, *' were sent in boxes marked Bibles, but without 
his knowledge, and so passed in safety through 
Missouri and the enemy's lines. Hence the term 
' Beecher's Bibles' came to be applied to these 
effective weapons."' 

The great War Governor of Indiana, afterwards 
Senator Morton, described on one occasion a long 
conversation which he had with Mr. Beecher, in 
which the pastor of Plymouth Church went thor- 
oughly over the whole ground of the anti-slavery 
struggle, marked the principles which should control 
it, and the policies which should be followed. The 
conversation made such an impression upon the 



^" Biography," p. 283. 



THE PILGRIMS ON THE KANSAS PRAIRIES. 211 

patriotic son of Indiana that, near the end of his life, 
he expressed a strong conviction that Mr. Beecher 
was the greatest statesman of his time. And as we 
read what he wrote and said in 1854, and the years 
immediately following, we understand some of the 
grounds for this noble eulogy. With the clearest 
perception of principles, he had that wisdom of bold- 
ness which is a chief characteristic of great states- 
manship in times of revolution. 

In an article on the defense of Kansas, he said: " A 
battle is to be fought. If we are wise, it will be 
bloodless. If we listen to the pusillanimous counsels 
of men who have never showed one throb of sympa- 
thy for liberty, we shall have blood to the horses' 
bridles. If bold wisdom prevails, the conflict will be 
settled afar off in Kansas and without blows or blood. 
But timidity and indifference will bring down blows 
there which will not only echo in our homes hither- 
ward, but will by-and-by lay the foundation for an 
armed struggle between the whole North and South. 

" Once when England only asserted the right to 
tax the Colonies without representation, the Colonies 
rebelled and went to war, But now a foreign legisla- 
ture has been imposed upon Kansas. That legislature 
has legalized slavery against the known wishes of 
nine-tenths of the actual settlers. It has decreed that 
no man shall enter the Territory who will not take 
an oath of allegiance to this spurious legislature. It 
has made it death to give liberty to the man escaping 
from oppression; it has muzzled the press; it has for- 
bidden discussion. It has made free speech a peni- 
tentiary offense. The rights for which the old Colo- 
nists fought were superficial compa,red to these. 



212 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

These are the rights which lie at the very heart of 
personal liberty. 

" But what is done must be done quickly. Funds 
must be freely given; arms must be had, even if 
bought at the price mentioned by our Saviour: ' He 
that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy 
one.' Young men who would do aught for liberty 
should take no counsel of fear. Now is the time 
when a man may do for his country in an hour more 
than in a whole life besides." ^ 

There was one man in the United States Senate 
who, with equal force and courage, was doing noble 
battle in the same cause. The blows he dealt at the 
Nation's giant sin came back on his own head. On 
the 22d of May, 1856, the South Carolina bully, Pres- 
ton S. Brooks, brought his heavy bludgeon down 
upon Charles Sumner, as he sat at his desk, unable 
to rise. Against this outrage the North everywhere 
protested. Sumner had taken a strong hold on the 
minds of multitudes of the educated young men in 
the North. He had touched and roused the North- 
ern conscience and furnished a victorious battle- 
cry to the political opponents of oppression in the 
declaration that Freedom was National and that 
Slavery was sectional. The Quaker poet of Freedom 
sung of him as one, 

"Who to the lettered wealth 
Of ages adds the lore unpriced, 
The wisdom and the moral health, 
The ethics of the school of Christ; 



1 <• 



Biography," p. 286. 



THE PILGRIMS ON THE KANSAS PRAIRIES. 213 

The statesman to his holy trust. 

As the Athenian Archon, just, 
Struck down, exiled like him for Truth alone." 

Mr. Beecher's unequaled power of bringing all 
his intellectual resources to the front on the instant, 
when his soul was filled with fiery and overmastering 
emotion, was impressively and grandly illustrated at 
the close of an immense meeting in New York City, 
called to protest against the dastardly outrage com- 
mitted on the Massachusetts Senator. He had been 
a quiet and interested listener to the speeches of 
William M. Evarts and others, who had held the 
attention of the meeting, but had not satisfied either 
the feelings or the convictions of the audience. It is 
one of the strangely interesting facts in the history of 
popular demonstrations, that the people themselves 
are sometimes more eloquent, fuller of passionate 
feeling, readier for an advanced position than those 
who happen to be their speakers. There were several 
occasions of this sort after the death of Abraham 
Lincoln, when the set and formal speeches of able 
men were very unsatisfactory, but where others who 
had made no intellectual preparation, but who gave 
themselves up to the tide of feeling that surged 
through all hearts, mastered the occasion. 

While the meeting was adjourning, Mr.Beecher was 
discovered in the rear of the hall, and the hungry- 
people demanded that he be called forward lo the 
platform. Mr. Evarts remarked that it would be a 
great pleasure to hear the distinguished clergyman, 
but Mr. Beecher was out of the city. Some people, 
however, shouted: " No, he is here," and very reluc- 
tantly, yielding to an irresistible demand, he went to 



214 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

the platform and pronounced one of the most success- 
ful and powerful addresses of his lifetime. 

Beginning with a clear narrative of the facts which 
were in themselves an appeal to passionate hatred 
of slavery, he was eagerly carried forward into a 
comprehensive survey of the whole anti-slavery con- 
test, of the principles involved, of the mighty stakes 
at issue. When we read what were the tremendous 
effects of this speech, of the waves of flaming enthus- 
iasm that rolled over the excited audience, we 
remember what was written by Lord Lytton, of the 
eloquence of Daniel O'Connell: 

" Then did I know what spells of infinite choice 
To rouse and lull, has the sweet human voice; 
Thus did I learn to seize the sudden clew 
To the grand troublous life antique — to view 
Under the rock-stand of Demosthenes 
Unstable Athens heave her noisy seas." 

The next day the people found that it was Beecher's 
speech which was completely reproduced in the 
papers, while the others received but slight notice. 
From that time on, Henry Ward Beecher took rank 
with the foremost leaders of the anti-slavery move- 
ment. 

There are few things which he ever wrote that are 
more scathing than his analysis of the reasons offered 
by some men for not attending the meetings called 
to protest against the brutal cowardice and cruelty 
which struck down Senator Sumner, and which, hav- 
ing been accepted by the South, made the South in 
part responsible for an almost unparalleled crime. 



CHAPTER XXI. 

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND ITS GREAT LEADERS. 

The Republican party was now coming to its great 
life, gathering into its ranks a constantly augmenting 
number of the best minds and bravest hearts of the 
country. "During the years 1854 and 1855 it had 
acquired control of the governments in a majority 
of the free States, and it promptly called a National 
Convention to meet in Philadelphia in June, 1856. 
The Democracy saw at once that a new and danger- 
ous opponent was in the field, — an opponent that 
stood upon principle and shunned expediency, that 
brought to its standard a great host of young men, 
and that won to its service a very large proportion of 
the talent, the courage, and the eloquence of the 
North. " ' 

No eulogy uttered by the most impassioned orator 
at a national political convention has perhaps, over- 
stated the significance, glory, and substantial services 
of that remarkable organization, born of a grand pur- 
pose, to oppose the aggressions of slavery. That it 
raised all the effective barriers ever built against the 
spread of the slave-power, that it nurtured and or- 
ganized the anti-slavery sentiment which so many 
causes had repressed and weakened, that it made 



^ BIaine*s " Twenty Years of Congress," Vol. I., p. 126. 



2l6 HENRY WARD BEECHER, 

clear to the popular mind the obscured ideals of lib- 
erty, and brought out of the gloom the earlier and 
brighter ideals of the Republic, that it forced upon 
the South a clear understanding of the impossibility 
of peaceably nationalizing her peculiar institution, 
that it furnished the administration, and very largely 
the military force, which destroyed the colossal rebel- 
lion and made the Union permanent, that it adopted 
and continued a commercial and financial policy 
which contributed largely to make the United States 
the richest and most prosperous of nations, that it 
gathered into its ranks the great mass of the most in- 
telligent and religious forces of the North, that it 
furnished and trained the illustrious statesmen who 
are the glory of the second great epoch of American 
history, that it successfully restored to peace the dis- 
cordant and dismembered Union, brought about the 
resumption of specie payments, strengthened and 
heightened the financial credit of the Government, 
and rendered a multitude of other services, making 
its policies so popular that one by one they have been 
adopted by its opponents; these are facts which 
justify a patriotic rather than a partisan enthusiasm, 
and which made Mr. Beecher and many others all the 
more deeply deplore the later corruptions of the 
party, and mourn the decadence of the brave spirit 
out of which it originally sprang. 

John C. Fremont was nominated as the leader of 
the Republican hosts in the Presidential contest of 
1856, on a platform pledged to resistance of any 
further extension of slavery, and any further compro- 
mise with slave institutions. The convention in 
Philadelphia declared it to be " both the right and 



REPUBLICAN PARTY AND ITS GREAT LEADERS. 21 7 

the imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the 
Territories those twin relics of barbarism, — polyga- 
my and slavery." 

Following the Philadelphia Convention, Mr. 
Beecher wrote one of the greatest editorials for The 
Independent that ever appeared in an American jour- 
nal. It revealed an enlightened statesmanship of the 
highest order. The article was called " On which 
Side is Peace ? " And while it showed that the North 
desired peace, and that all its interests, agricultural, 
manufacturing, commercial, social, civil, and religious, 
demanded peace, the way to secure it was not by 
further yielding to the demands of slavery. " There 
are periods in the history of men, and of communi- 
ties, in w^hich timid counsels are rash and dangerous. 
When a building is on fire, and quantities of explo- 
sive materials are awaiting its approach, the only 
moderation consists in the most intense courage and 
desperate daring. He is the prudent man who 
rushes in between the flame and powder and sepa- 
rates them. " ' 

He showed that the national building w^as already 
on fire, that the flame was running to the magazine, 
that fifteen States in the Union had based their social 
condition on a system of involuntary servitude, de- 
moralizing to personal habits and political ideas; 
that liberty of speech and of the press, and liberty of 
political action were inconsistent with slavery. " If 
it is right to have slavery, it is right to have its 
necessary defenses. Ignorance is right if slavery is 
right. Free speech is wrong if slavery is right. A 



*** Patnotic Addresses," p. 196. 



2l8 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

system of force cannot deal with moral suasion. You 
cannot lay the foundations of a political system 
upon the law of Might, and then run up its towers 
and spires by the doctrine of Right. " ^ 

"The same secret, fatal current of necessity, drifts 
the South toward the extension of slavery. While 
free States are growing with prodigious dispropor- 
tion, there can be no doubt that slave States will be- 
come imbecile and helpless in comparison. Virginia 
cannot grow — Pennsylvania cannot stand still. The 
Carolinas are sinking by the nature of their industry 
— New York is advancing prodigiously. Georgia has 
no chance in a match with Ohio. If the slave States 
stand as they are, and depend upon the inherent 
energies of their own system, they are doomed, in- 
evitably, to become the last and least." ^ 

After showing that the policy of the South was not 
one of vexatious haughtiness but of necessity, spring- 
ing from the very organization of her society, he 
made it plain that wise men would not put into places 
of supreme national power those who represented 
this system with all its tendencies, that it would be 
wrong to give the control of the continent to a 
system which needed continual enlargement in order 
to make up year by year its own desperate weakness. 

" The men, who denied the right of petition; who 
made war on Mexico; who introduced Texas as a 
slave State; who compelled the North, in 1850, to 
take the compromise, promising that it should be a 
finality ; who broke a Nation's word and faith, and 



' " Patriotic Addresses," pp. 197, 198. 
2 " Patriotic Addresses/' p. 199. 



REPUBLICAN PARTY AND ITS GREAT LEADERS. 219 

abolished the Missouri Compromise, promising that 
Kansas should be free or slave as its people chose; 
who, before the words of promise were cold, invaded 
Kansas with armed bands, and committed on the 
real settlers every crime which is marked in the 
criminal calendar; who sent thither United States 
troops, and brought the whole force of the Govern- 
ment to corroborate the Civil War which the South 
had kindled there; who, failing in intimidating free 
speech, assaulted with the bludgeon, in the Senate 
Chamber, one of the noblest national men, and with 
almost unanimous consent justified the felony — this 
party have published a platform and nominated a 
candidate for the next four critical years in our 
history." ^ 

Mr. Beecher appealed to considerate men not to 
continue in power the malign forces which he had 
described. '* Will it be possible," he asked, " with such 
a history coming on, to avoid a conflict, compared 
with which anything we have ever known will be 
child's play? " ^' When the arms of the South shall 
be made strong, and her feet shall be made firm upon 
the high places of Government, is there anything in 
the bearing and temper of the South hitherto, which 
may lead us to hope for moderation ? Will not her 
necessities make her as violent hereafter as hereto- 
fore? If the lion's whelp is dangerous even when 
kenneled, will it become harmless when grown into 
the full lion, and roving at its will in unrestrained 
liberty?" 

He showed that the platform on which Mr. Buchan- 



*" Patriotic Addresses," p. 200. 



220 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

an stood was a platform made wholly of Southern 
pine. '' It stands sharply against Northern doctrines. 
It portends an open and undisguised sweep of 
Southern ideas across our whole continent. And 
unless the North has made up its mind to go into the 
minority, to give up all the inherent advantages be- 
longing to free labor, to yield up liberty of speech, 
and freedom of soil, and nationality of legislation, 
then the election of Mr. Buchanan will be the begin- 
ning of an excitement and of a warfare such as has 
never been dreamed of hitherto."' 

He showed that while Mr. Buchanan sincerely 
loved peace every vote for him was a vote for war. 
" If men wish wilder times, fiercer conflicts, deadlier 
civil war, let them vote for the Southern platform. 
Northern moderation now will be bloodshed by and 
by." 

"The only way to peace is that way which shall 
chain slavery to the place that it now has, and say to 
the dragon — ' In thine own den thou mayest dwell, 
and lie down in thine own slime. But thou shalt not 
go forth to ravage free territory, nor leave thy trail 
upon unspotted soil.' "^ 

Prophetic statesmanship so clear, wise, far-seeing as 
this is rare at any time. It is no wonder that Mr. 
Beecher was early recognized not only as a powerful 
reformer, but as possessing in an unusual degree 
every statesmanlike quality of mind. With the 
hearty consent of his own Church, Mr. Beecher 
entered on the memorable canvass of 1856, with all 



*" Patriotic Addresses," p. 201. 
^ *' Patriotic Addresses," p. 202. 



REPUBLICAN PARTY AND ITS GREAT LEADERS. 221 

the vigor of the conviction which had been nurtured 
and deepened in previous contests. He made three 
hours' speeches, several times a week, before audi- 
ences of many thousands, especially in those districts 
of New York State where the old-time Whigs were 
attempting to run in a third candidate. 

A warm friend of Mr. Beecher (Mr. N. D. Pratt, 
of Chicago) furnishes the following interesting 
reminiscence of this campaign: "In the year 1856, 

when Fremont was the first Presidential candidate of 

r 
the Republican Party, the Republicans of Woodstock 

Commons, Connecticut, held a large Republican rally 
or barbecue, as it was called, to which came thou- 
sands from the neighboring country. Many went 
from my native place, Southbridge, Massachusetts, 
a few miles across the line, and my father took us 
boys to this great meeting. I remember among the 
interesting things was a large delegation from East 
Woodstock, and in that procession was an immense 
wagon, drawn by some twenty-five pairs of oxen, 
and upon the wagon were young ladies, dressed in 
white, one to represent each State of the Union, as it 
then was. 

An enormous crowd was upon the Common during 
the speeches that were made by men of national 
reputati )n. . I remember when standing by my father, 
holding his hand, that Henry J. Raymond, the famous 
editor of the New Yoj'k Times, made a speech, and 
that during this speech there strolled along our way, 
on the outskirts of the crowd, a man who came near 
to us, and stood by us. He was a striking-looking 
person, with a strong, manly face; long hair that 
reached to his shoulders, a remarkable eye, a high 



222 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

forehead. He wore a light-colored slouch hat, and 
from his shoulders hung a gray shawl, such as were 
worn very generally instead of overcoats by men in 
those days. His face attracted me, young as I was, 
and on that day began an admiration for it, and a 
constant desire to look upon it, whenever in his pres- 
ence, that amounted, I may say, to a fascination to 
me to the end of his days. My father said to me: 
' That is Henry Ward Beecher,' and then we spoke 
with him. His kindly way won me from the first. 
He strolled about the edge of the crowd for awhile, 
and then went toward the platform, and followed 
Mr. Raymond. Young as I was, I was much inter- 
ested to see how he entertained, interested, and in- 
structed the audience, made up of people of all sorts 
— farmers, merchants, young men, young women, 
boys, and girls, and although I cannot recall a word 
that he said on that occasion, as I was too young to 
remember such speeches, I remember that his words 
influenced me then in favor of freedom, and to hate 
slavery, and to admire Fremont, the Pathfinder, who 
was the first nominee of the Republican party." 

The same writer recalls an incident which Mr. 
Beecher told him years afterward, in connection 
with a speech in the Fremont campaign which he 
made at Rome, N. Y. " He mentioned it as one of 
the most entertaining and amusing of the many that 
occurred in his public life. He said that when 
speaking at Rome one evening upon the two leading 
candidates, and alluding to the third, the compromise 
candidate, he said: 'My friends, in this great cam- 
paign there are but two sides, and we must range 
ourselves upon one side or the other; there is no 



REPUBLICAN PARTY AND ITS GREAT LEADERS. 223 

middle ground for any of us. On the one side is 
Buchanan, with the black shield of slavery, and upon 
the other is Fremont, with the white banner of lib- 
erty, and with one or the other of these two you must 
take your stand; but who is this that I see crawling 
under the fence? Oh, that is Millard Fillmore.' Im- 
mediately a little dapper fellow in the front row 
jumped up, looked in under the chairs, and shouted 
out: ' Where is he ? ' A large number of the audience 
saw and heard it, and broke out into uproarious 
laughter that extended throughout the whole house, 
and stopped the speaking for several minutes. They 
laughed so that the little fellow felt so uncomforta- 
ble he got up and went out. All through the eve- 
ning, every few minutes, some one would sing out in 
some part of the house: ' Where is he ? ' Then there 
would be a ripple of laughter that would extend 
throughout the hall, and the speech be interrupted, 
Mr. Beecher himself joining with the audience hear- 
tily." 

Mr. Beecher said of this campaign:''! felt at that 
time that it was very likely that I should sacrifice my 
life, or my voice at any rate, but I was willing to lay 
down either, or both of them, for that cause." There 
probably has been no political campaign in the 
United States into which so much moral enthusiasm 
entered, and probably no Presidential campaign, un- 
less it be those of 1840 and 1884, into which was car- 
ried so much personal enthusiasm, as was roused by 
the struggle to elect Fremont in 1856. It drew into 
its fervid discussion many of the greatest men of the 
critical epoch which was soon to come. Henry Wil- 
son and John A. Andrew in Massachusetts, William 



224 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

H. Seward in New York, Oliver Perry Morton in 
Indiana, Abraham Lincoln in Illinois, Jacob M. 
Howard in Michigan, the sturdy and great-minded 
statesman, Timothy Otis Howe, of Wisconsin, des- 
tined to a leading position in the United States Senate; 
James G. Blaine, of Maine, a young journalist of 
twenty-six, who then gained his first eminence as a 
'public speaker; these were a few of the men whose 
voices rang out in the summer of 1856 against further 
compromise with the friends of slavery extension. 

There was much in Fremont himself and in his 
career to inspire the young anti-slavery voters. He 
was a soldier, a gallant explorer; he had associated his 
name with Rocky Mountain adventures. Though a 
native of South Carolina, he had been foremost in 
the struggle to make California free, and to bring her 
into the Union; he had been one of the first Senators 
from that golden commonwealth of the Pacific. 
Whittier's lines on *' The Pass of the Sierra," which 
told how he had led his mountain men over the 
frozen throne of winter down into the warm valleys 
and summer fields which lay to the westward, stir the 
blood even now, as they drew the hot tears in the 
August of 1856 : 

" Strong leader of that mountain band, 

Another task remains, 
To break from Slavery's desert land 
A path to Freedom's plains. 

The winds are wild, the way is drear. 

Yet, flashing through the night, 
Lo ! icy ridge and rocky spear 

Blaze out in morning light ! " 



REPUBLICAN PARTY AND ITS GREAT LEADERS. 225 

" Rise up, FRfiMONT! and go before ; 
The Hour must have its man ; 
Put on the hunting-shirt once more. 
And lead in Fr&edom's van." 

One of Mr. Beecher's most effective articles during 
the campaign was the story of the dog Noble and the 
empty hole, in which he made fun of the persistent 
attacks of certain pro-slavery newspapers, who tried to 
make capital against Fremont by falsely asserting that 
he was a Roman Catholic. Fremont had fallen in love 
with Jessie Benton, the daughter of the great Senator 
from Missouri, and the lovers had run away and been 
married by a Catholic priest. "If we had been in 
Col. Fremont's place," wrote Mr. Beecher, " we would 
have been married, if it had required us to walk 
through a row of priests and bishops as long as from 
Washington to Rome, ending up with the Pope him- 
self." The famous story narrated the enthusiasm of 
an intelligent dog, named Noble, who having seen a 
red squirrel running into a hole in a stone wall could 
not be persuaded that the squirrel was not in that 
hole for ever. "When all other occupations failed, 
this hole remained to him. When there were no 
more chickens to harry, no pigs to bite, no cattle to 
chase, no children to romp with, no expeditions to 
make with the grown folks, and when he had slept all 
his dog-skin would hold, he would walk out of the 
yard, yawn and stretch himself, and then look wistfully 
at the hole as if thinking to himself: ' Well, as there 
is nothing else to do I may as well try that hole 
again! * 

" We had almost forgotten this little trait until the 
conduct of the New York Express in respect to Col. 

15 



226 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Fremont's religion brought it ludicrously to mind 
again. Col. Fremont is and always has been as 
sound a Protestant as John Knox ever was. He was 
bred in the Protestant faith and has never changed. 
. . . But the Express^ like Noble, has opened on 
this hole in the wall and can never be done barking 
at it. Day after day it resorts to this empty hole. 
When everything else fails this resource remains. 
There they are indefatigably, the Express and Noble, 
a Church without a Fremont, and a hole without a 
squirrel in it! . . . We never read the Express 
nowadays without thinking involuntarily, * Goodness, 
the dog is letting off at that hole again.*" 



CHAPTER XXII. 

TRUTH ON THE SCAFFOLD, WRONG ON THE THRONE. 

Fremont was defeated, and never rose again, ex- 
cept for a brief period in the war, to national prom- 
inence. James Buchanan, the tool of slavery, was 
placed in the White House. But the Republican 
party had won its first great victory. Fremont had 
received over a million three hundred thousand votes. 

" The Republicans, far from being discouraged, 
felt and acted as men who had won the battle. 
Indeed the moral triumph was theirs, and they be- 
lieved that the actual victory at the polls was only 
postponed. The Democrats were mortified and as- 
tounded by the large popular vote against them. The 
loss of New York and Ohio, the narrow escape from 
defeat in Pennsylvania, the rebuke of Michigan to 
their veteran leader. General Cass, intensified by the 
choice of Chandler, his successor in the Senate, the 
absolute consolidation of New England against 
them, all tended to humiliate and discourage the 
party. They had lost ten States which General 
Pierce had carried in 1852, and they had a watchful, 
determined foe in the field, eager for another trial of 
strength. The issue was made, the lines in battle 
were drawn. Freedom or slavery in the Territories, 



228 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

all was to be fought to the end, without flinching, and 
without compromise."* 

After the election of Buchanan, the next great, 
portentous event in the anti-slavery struggle was 
Capt. John Brown's sudden attack on Harper's 
Ferry, made on the 17th of October, 1858. This start- 
ling event had more momentous consequences than 
even the Southern or the anti-slavery leaders then 
clearly saw. It roused to the highest pitch the feel- 
ings and deepened the convictions on both sides of 
Mason and Dixon's line, and doubtless hastened the 
outbreak of the Civil War. 

On the 30th of October, while the imprisoned John 
Brown was awaiting his trial, Mr, Beecher preached 
a notable sermon on " The Nation's Duty to Slavery," 
in which, while maintaining with great eloquence the 
principles of freedom, he manifested a spirit of kind- 
ness and forbearance toward the South which con- 
trasted with some of the fiercer utterances of the 
hour. Utilizing the Harper's Ferry incident and the 
national excitement over it, he made some very prac- 
tical and sensible observations on the present state of 
the country. After portraying the amazement and 
fear of Virginia occasioned by the falling and ex- 
ploding of the burning aerolite at Harper's Ferry, 
after commenting on the excitement caused by the 
seventeen white men who attacked the great State, 
and held two thousand citizens in duress till the 
whole commonwealth was alarmed, he gave a de- 
scription of the courageous fanatic who had terrified 
a great people, telling how Brown, the kind-hearted, 



* Blaine's " Twenty Years of Congress," Vol. I., p. 130. 



TRUTH ON SCAFFOLD, WRONG ON THRONE. 229 

industrious, peace-loving man, with a large family of 
children, had sought a free man's home in Kansas. 
" That infant colony held thousands of souls as noble 
as liberty ever inspired or religion enriched. A great 
scowling slave State, its nearest neighbor, sought to 
tread down this liberty-loving colony, and to dragoon 
slavery into it by force of arms." 

" It was in this field that Brown received his im- 
pulse. A tender father, whose life was in his son's 
life, he saw his first-born seized like a felon, chained, 
driven across the country, crazed by suffering and 
heat, beaten like a dog by the officer in charge, and 
long lying at death's door! Another noble boy, 
without warning, without offense, unarmed, in open 
day, in the midst of the city, was shot dead! No 
justice sought out the murderers; no United States 
attorney was despatched in hot haste; no marines or 
soldiers aided the wronged and weak! 

" The shot that struck the child's heart crazed the 
father's brain. Revolving his wrongs, and nursing 
his hatred of that deadly system that breathed such 
contempt at justice and humanity, at length his 
phantoms assume a slender reality, and organized 
such an enterprise as one might expect from a man 
whom grief had bereft of good judgment."^ 

After praising his boldness, honesty, freedom from 
deceit, and general manliness, Mr. Beecher said: ''I 
deplore his misfortunes. I sympathize with his sor- 
rows. I mourn the hiding or obscuration of his 
reason. I disapprove of his mad and feeble scheme. 
I shrink from the folly of the bloody foray, and 



*" Patriotic Addresses," p. 206. 



230 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

I shrink likewise from all the anticipation of that 
judicial bloodshed, which doubtless eie long will 
follow — for when was cowardice ever magnanimous ? 
. . . Let no man pray that Brown be spared; 
let Virginia make him a martyr. Now, he has only 
blundered. His soul was noble; his work miserable. 
But a cord and a gibbet would redeem all that and 
round up Brown's failure with a heroic success."* 

The prophecy was more than fulfilled, though Mr. 
Beecher little dreamed that the giant wrong which 
the old man attacked would in a few years be tramp- 
led out in blood to the sublime music of the old 
man's name. 

Mr. Beecher shov/ed the insecurity of those States 
that " carried powder as their chief cargo." With- 
out expressing at large his well-known opinions on 
the great evil of slavery, he wisely urged that one's 
views on this subject might be right and yet his 
views of duty toward it might be wrong. There were 
unjustifiable ways of attacking even slavery. As 
four millions of colored slaves dwelt in the midst of 
the population of ten millions of whites in fifteen 
different States, and as these States were bound up 
with other States in a common national life, he held 
that the question of duty was not simply what was 
duty towards blacks, and not what is duty toward 
the whites, but what is duty to each and to both 
united. " I am bound by the great law of love to 
consider my duties toward the slave, and I am bound 
by the great law of love also to consider my duties to- 
ward the white man who is his master. Both are to 



* '* Patriotic Addresses," p. 207. 



TRUTH ON SCAFFOLD, WRONG ON THRONE. 23I 

be treated with Christian wisdom and forbearance. 
We must seek to benefit the slave as well as the white 
man, and the white man as really as the slave." ^ 

He endeavored to throw some clear light upon 
this very difficult problem, and no wiser or more ' 
Christian words were spoken at that time than his. 
He showed, in the first place, that it was not right to 
treat the citizens of the South with bitter acrimony 
because they were involved in a system of wrong- 
doing. /' A malignant speech about slavery will not 
do any good; and, most of all, it will not do those 
any good who most excite our sympathy — the chil- 
dren of bondage. If we hope to ameliorate the con- 
dition of the slave, the first step must not be taken 
by setting the masters against them." 

In the next place he taught that the breeding of 
discontent among the bondmen of our land was not 
the right way to help them. " If I were in the South, 
I should, not from fear of the master, but from the 
most deliberate sense of the injurious effects of it to 
the slave, never by word or act do anything to excite 
discontent among those who were in slavery. The 
condition of the slave must be changed, but the change 
cannot go on in one part of the community alone. 
There must be change in the law, change in the 
Church, change in the upper classes, change in the 
middle, and in all classes. Emancipation when it 
comes, will come either by revolution or by a change 
of public opinion in the whole community."^ 

In the third place he showed that no relief would 
be afforded to the slaves of the South as a body, by 



Patriotic Addresses," p. 209. ''^•" Patriotic Addresses," p. 2H. 



232 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

an individual or by any organized plan to carry them 
off, or to incite them to abscond. " The more enlight- 
ened and liberty-loving among the Southern slaves 
bear too much of their masters' blood not to avail 
themselves of any opening to escape; it is their right; 
it will be their practice. Free locomotion is an inci- 
dent of slave-property which the master must put up 
with. Nimble legs are of much use in tempering the 
severity of slavery. If, therefore, an enslaved man, 
acting from the yearnings of his own heart, desires to 
run away, who shall forbid him? In all the earth, 
wherever a human being is held in bondage, he has a 
right to slough his burden and break his yoke if he 
can." 

*' I stand on the outside of this great cordon of 
darkness, and every man that escapes from it, running 
for his life, shall have some help from me, if he comes 
forth of his own free accord; yet I would never incite 
slaves to run away, or send any other man to do it. 
We have no right to carry into the midst of slavery 
exterior discontent; and for this reason: that it is not 
good for the slaves themselves.'" ^ 

" Four million men cannot run away, until God 
sends ten Egyptian plagues to help them." 

In the fourth place, he would not tolerate anything 
like insurrection and civil war. " It is bad for the 
master, bad for the slave, bad for all that are neigh- 
bors to them, bad for the whole land — bad from be- 
ginning to end! " ^ 

" According to God's Word, so long as a man re- 
mains a servant he must obey his master. The right 



* " Patriotic Addresses," p. 212. "-^ " Patriotic Addresses," p. 213. 



TRUTH ON SCAFFOLD, WRONG ON THRONE. 233 

of the slave to throw off the control of his master is 
not abrogated. The right of the subject to do this is 
neither defined nor limited. But the use of this right 
must conform to reason, and not to mere impulse. 
The leaders of a people have no right to whelm their 
helpless followers in terrible disaster by inciting them 
to rebel, under circumstances that afford not the 
slightest hope that their rebellion will rise to the 
dignity of a successful revolution. 

"This has been the eminent wisdom of that Hun- 
garian exile, Kossuth. In spite of all that is written 
and said against this noble man, I stand to my first 
full faith in him. The uncrowned hero is the noblest 
man, after all, in Europe! And his statesmanship 
has been shown in this: that his burning sense of the 
right of his people to be free has not led him to incite 
them to premature, partial, and easily overmatched 
revolt."^ 

" Now, if the Africans in our land were intelligent, 
if they understood themselves, if they had self-govern- 
ing power, if they were able first to throw off the 
yoke of adverse laws and institutions, and afterwards 
defend and build themselves up into a civil state, they 
would have just the same right to assume their inde- 
pendence that any nation has. But does any man 
believe that this is the case ? "^ 

Turning from these specifications as to the wrong 
way to deal with slavery, he expressed his mind freely 
as to the right way. He believed, first, in beginning 
at the North and emancipating the colored men near 
at home. " How are the free colored people treated 



* "Patriotic Addresses," p. 214. ^ "Patriotic Addresses," p. 215. 



234 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

at the North? They are almost without education, 
and with but little sympathy for their ignorance. 
They are refused the common rights of citizenship 
which the whites enjoy. They cannot even ride in 
the cars of our city railroads. They are snuffed at in 
the house of God, or tolerated with ill-concealed 
disgust. Can a black man be a mason in New York? 
Let him be employed as a journeyman, and every 
Irish lover of liberty that carried a hod or trowel 
would leave at once, or compel him to leave! Can 
the black man be a carpenter? There is scarcely a 
carpenter's shop in New York in which a journeyman 
would continue to work if a black man were employed 
in it. . . . We tax them, and then refuse to allow 
their children to go to our public schools. We heap 
upon them moral obloquy more atrocious than that 
which the master heaps upon the slave. And, not- 
withstanding all this, we lift ourselves up to talk to 
the Southern people about the rights and liberties of 
the human soul, and especially the African soul ! " 

" Every effort that is made in Brooklyn to establish 
schools and churches for the free colored people, and 
to encourage them to educate themselves, and be- 
come independent, is a step toward emancipation in 
the South. The degradation of free colored men in 
the North will fortify slavery in tho South ! " ^ 

In the next place, he believed that all the springs 
of feeling in the free States should be quickened in 
behalf of human liberty. " Liberty with us must be 
raised by religion from the selfishness of an instinct 
to the sanctity of a moral principle! . . . We 



Patriotic Addresses," pp. 216-217. 



TRUTH ON SCAFFOLD, WRONG ON THRONE. 235 

must inspire in the public mind a profound sense of 
the rights of men founded upon their relations to 
God. The glory of intelligence, refinement, genius, 
has nothing to do with men's rights. The rice slave, 
the Hottentot, are as mnch God's children as Hum- 
boldt or Chalmers." 

" What can the North do for the South, unless her 
own heart is purified and ennobled ? When the love 
of liberty is at so low an ebb that Churches dread the 
sound, ministers shrink from the topic; when book- 
publishers dare not publish or republish a word on 
the subject of slavery, cut out every living word from 
school books, expurgate life-passages from Humboldt, 
Spurgeon, and all foreign authors or teachers; and 
when great religious publication societies, endowed 
for the very purpose of speaking fearlessly the truths 
which interest would let perish, pervert their trusts, 
and are dumb, first and chiefly, and articulate only in 
things that thousands of others could publish as well 
as they — what chance is there that public sentiment 
in such a community will have any power with the 
South? "^ 

In the third place, he advocated, in every way con- 
sistent with fearless assertion of truth, the mainte- 
nance of sympathetic kindness toward the South. 
"We are brethren; and I pray that no fratricidal 
influences be permitted to sunder this Union. There 
was a time when I thought the body of death would 
be too much for life, and that the North was in 
danger of taking disease from the South, rather than 
they our health. That time has gone past." " I am 



* " Patriotic Addresses," p. 218. 



236 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

for holding the heart of the North right up to the 
heart of the South. Every heart-beat will be, ere 
long, not a blow riveting oppression, but a throb 
carrying new health."^ 

In the fourth place he urged that no pains be 
spared, through the Christian conscience of the South, 
to give to the slave himself a higher moral status. 
*' If you wish to work for the enfranchisement of the 
African, seek to make him a better man. Teach him 
to be an obedient servant, and an honest, true, Chris- 
tian man. . . . To make a slave morose, fractious, 
disobedient, and unwilling to work is the way to 
defer his emancipation. We do not ask the slave 
to be satisfied with slavery. . . . It is the low 
animal condition of the African that enslaves him. 
It is moral enfranchisement that will break his 
bonds." ' 

In the fifth place, he proceeded to show that the 
things promoting emancipation were not so compli- 
cated or numerous as some people imagined. '' A few 
virtues established, a few usages maintained, a few 
rights guaranteed to the slaves, and the system is 
vitally wounded. The right of chastity in the woman, 
the unblemished household love, the right of parents 
in their children — on these three elements stands the 
whole weight of society." " I stand up in behalf of 
two million women who are without a voice, to declare 
that there ought to be found in Christianity, some- 
where, an influence which shall protect their right to 
their own persons, and that their purity shall stand 



^ •* Patriotic Addresses," p. 219. 

2 " Patriotic Addresses," pp. 219-220 



TRUTH ON SCAFFOLD, WRONG ON THRONE. 237 

on some other ground than the caprice of their 
masters." ^ 

^* I declare that there must be a Christian public 
sentiment that shall make the family inviolate. Men 
sometimes say, * It is rarely the case that families are 
separated.' It is false! It is false! There is not a 
slave-mart that does not bear testimony, a thousand 
times over, against such an assertion. Children are 
bred like colts and calves, and are dispersed like 
them." " The moment you make slaves serfs, they are 
no longer a legal tender, and are uncurrent in the 
market; and families are so cumbrous, so difficult to 
support, so expensive, that owners are compelled, 
from reasons of pecuniary interest, to discontinue the 
system." ^ 

And, finally, among the means to be employed for 
promoting the liberty of the slave, he did not fail to 
include the power of true Christian prayer. Mr. John 
R. Howard, in his review of Mr. Beecher's personality 
and political influence, has said : " No Southerner 
to-day would be able to disSent from his doctrine as 
expounded in that discourse, or could help a warming 
of heart toward a man who, in the midst of such a 
tempest of popular excitement along the line of prin- 
ciples which he himself had done so much to inspire, 
could yet so temperately and considerately and Chris- 
tianly stretch forth the restraining hand of wisdom." 



^ " Patriotic Addresses," pp. 220-221. 
^ " Patdotic Addresses," pp. 221-222. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

BEECHER THE EMANCIPATOR. 

Mr. Beecher's influence was daily enlarging at the 
North. The two most influential journalists of the 
Republican party, Horace Greeley and Henry J. Ray- 
mond, took frequent counsel with him in regard to 
public policy. As a practical Abolitionist he was 
probably the most effective man in the country. 

His aid in freeing the Edmonson sisters, as early as 
1848, has already been noted, but this was only one 
of many successful efforts to buy the liberty of his 
brothers and sisters in bondage. " I was always glad, 
at suitable times," he said to his own people, '' as often 
as was proper, to bring before you living men and 
women, and let them stand and look at you in the 
face, that you might see what sort of creatures slaves 
were made of. I was glad by every means in my power 
to arouse men's feelings against the abomination of 
slavery, which I hated with an unutterable hatred." 

A slave girl, named " Pink," or " Pinkie," " too fair 
and beautiful a child for her own good," was brought 
to his attention as one whom he might help to pur- 
chase and thus save from the hell of transportation to 
the far Southern slave-market. She was brought 
North and placed by him on the platform of Plymouth 
Church. "And the rain never fell faster than the 



BEECHER THE EMANCIPATOR. 239 

tears from many of you that were here. The scene 
was one of intense enthusiasm. The child was bought, 
and overbought. The collection that was taken on 
the spot was enough, and more than enough, to pur- 
chase her. It so happened (it is not wrong to men- 
tion now) that a lady known to literary fame as Miss 
Rose Terry was present; and as, like many others, 
she had not with her as much money as she wanted 
to give, she took a ring off from her hand and threw 
it into the contribution-box. That ring I took and 
put it into the child's hand, and said to her : ' Now 
remember, that this is your freedom-ring.' Her ex- 
pression, as she stood and looked at it for a moment, 
was pleasing to behold; and Eastman Johnson, the 
artist, was so much interested in the occurrence that 
he determined to represent it on canvas, and he 
painted her looking at her freedom-ring; and I have 
a transcript of the picture now at my house." ^ 

She was afterwards called Rose Ward, Rose from 
the name of the lady who gave the beautiful opal ring 
and Ward from Mr. Beecher's second name. He 
raised one hundred and fifty dollars to give her a 
year's schooling in the Lincoln University at Wash- 
ington. 

One of the most thrilling scenes in Plymouth Church 
occurred on June i, 1856. Mr. Beecher prefaced what 
he was about to do and justified it by reading from 
the Gospels the story of what Jesus wrought on the 
Sabbath Day, in healing the man with the withered 
hand; and then he told of a young woman who was 
to be sold by her own father " to go South — for what 



* " Biography," p. 296. 



240 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

purpose you can imagine, when you see." The slave- 
trader w^ho bought her for twelve hundred dollars was 
moved to offer her the opportunity of purchasing her 
freedom, giving one hundred dollars himself and per- 
suading two others to give a hundred dollars each. 
Through the kindness of free-State men in Washing- 
ton she had been able to add four hundred dollars 
to her ransom money, and Mr. Beecher was asked to 
raise what remained, which he promised to do on 
condition that she were permitted to come North. 
She gave her word of honor that she would return to 
Richmond in case the money was not all forthcoming. 

Going to the stairs that lead up to the platform, 
Mr. Beecher said: ''Come up here, Sarah, and let us 
all see you." The young woman ascended the steps, 
and, much embarrassed, sank down into the chair. 
''The white blood of her father might be traced in 
her regular features and high, thoughtful brow, while 
her complexion and wavy hair betrayed her slave 
mother. 'And this,' said Mr. Beecher, ' is a market- 
able commodity. Such as she are put into one balance 
and silver into the other. She is now legally free, 
but she is bound by a moral obligation which is 
stronger than any law. I reverence woman. For 
the sake of the love I bore my mother, I hold her 
sacred, even in the lowest position, and will use every 
means in my power for her uplifting. What will you 
do now ? May she read her liberty in your eyes ? ' " ' 

The plates were passed, and soon filled. Amid 
their tears the congregation had the joy of giving 
liberty. Mr. Lewis Tappan finally rose, and said 



1 «« 



Biography," p. 298. 



BEECHER THE EMANCIPATORo 241 

that there need be no anxiety about the result of the 
effort, as some gentlemen had pledged themselves to 
make up the deficiency whatever it might be. After 
the announcement had been made that the act of 
emancipation was completed, and the involuntary 
applause had subsided, Mr. Beecher said: " When the 
old Jews went up to their solemn feast, they made 
the mountains round about Jerusalem ring with their 
shouts. I do not approve of an unholy clapping in 
the house of God, but when a good deed is well done, 
it is not wrong to give an outward expression of our 
joy." Then the congregation sang a hymn, perhaps 
as it was never sung before: 

" Do not I love Thee, O, my Lord ? 
Behold my heart and see ; 
And turn the dearest idol out 
That dares to rival Thee. 

Hast Thou a lamb in all thy flock 
I would disdain to feed ? 
Hast Thou a foe before whose face 
I fear Thy cause to plead ? " 

It was found that seven hundred and eighty-three 
dollars had been given, so that not only the woman 
but her two years' old child could be redeemed. 

Mr. N. D. Pratt, of Chicago, gives the following 
reminiscences: *'In September, i860, I first visited my 
brother in New York; on Sunday morning he took 
me to Mr. Beecher's church. I recall what is so 
familiar to all who attended that church; the crowds 
that left the ferry-boat, and went up Fulton street, so 
that the answer one received generally, if he asked 
the way to Mr. Beecher's church on Sunday morn- 
ing, at any time after ten o'clock on leaving the ferry, 
16 



242 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

was, * Follow tlie crowd.' I was impressed as I never 
was before with the power of pulpit oratory. I 
remember how the vast throng listened to every 
word — recall the atmosphere during the prayer, 
which always seemed different in Plymouth Church 
from that of any other. . . . During the days of 
the Civil War, there were scenes in Plymouth Church 
that impressed themselves upon the attendants for 
all time. Mr. Beecher preached patriotic sermons 
constantly, and if one had not been taught to love 
freedom before, he could only become a lover of 
liberty, and learn to hate the institution of slavery 
under such influences." 

'' One Sunday morning he had baptized a large 
number of children, twenty or more; he then took a 
little white child, with a beautiful face and curly 
hair, and went into the pulpit, and stood for a 
moment there; the congregation looked upon the 
scene with surprise and curiosity. Then he said: 'I 
have brought this child into the pulpit for I wished it 
to teach a moral lesson.* There was deathlike silence 
and suspense for a moment or two; then he said: 
^ This child was born a slave, and has just been re- 
deemed from slavery.' He went on to relate that one 
of the nurses in our army had found the child in Vir- 
ginia, and had sent her to Brooklyn to him; he had 
found a home for it in a wealthy family where she was 
to be cared for and educated. Dr. Lord, president of 
Dartmouth College, had lately written a book upon 
slavery as a Divine institution. Mr. Beecher said: 
'When I see a drabbled woman upon Broadway, 
when I meet a man who has been wrecked, I feel as 
if I could lay down my life for them, if necessary, to 



BEECHER THE EMANCIPATOR. 243 

save them; but when I read a book written by a 
hoary-headed president of a college, intended to 
extol an institution tliat would consign a child like 
this to a life worse than death, I curse him, in the 
name of my God,' The congregation, their feelings 
wrought to the highest pitch, broke forth into 
applause, and when it had subsided, Mr. Beecher put 
his hand upon the child's head, and said: 'Anna, 
blossom of liberty, I baptize thee in the name of 
the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, 
Amen.' There was not a dry eye in the congrega- 
tion, and a lesson of freedom was taught by that 
scene that scores of sermons would fail to teach. The 
child was reared and educated in a Brooklyn family, 
and became a beautiful, cultivated woman, a fine 
singer, and an ornament to society." 

Mr. Pratt also recalls the following: "Twenty years 
later, or more, in talking with Mr. Beecher upon the 
services in his church during the war, I mentioned 
this scene as one of the most interesting to me; he 
recalled it, and said that with one exception, perhaps, 
it was the most thrilling scene ever enacted in his 
church. He then read me the story of the purchase 
of a slave in Plymouth Church, and stated that he 
could never tell this story and control himself. This 
last remark he made upon my request that he tell the 
story in the lecture he was to deliver that evening at 
Central Music Hall, in which he was to give an 
account of his trip across the continent, and return 
through the South, including a visit to New Orleans. 
I will repeat it here, as Mr. Beecher told it to me, 
according to my best recollection of it. He stated 
that a female slave had escaped from her master, and 



244 HENRY WARD EEECHER. 

had reached Brooklyn; she had been found, and 
under the Fugitive Slave Law could be returned to 
New Orleans, her home. Mr. Beecher made inquiry 
as to her value, and word came to him from her 
owner at New Orleans, that if Henry Ward Beecher 
would promise that either the woman or two thou- 
sand dollars should reach New Orleans in ten days, 
he would be satisfied with that promise, and would 
let the matter take its course. 

" Mr. Beecher sent back word that either the two 
thousand dollars or the woman should be in New 
Orleans by that time. He said to me that he was 
pleased that a slaveholder who naturally hated and 
distrusted him should show this confidence in him. 
On the following Sunday morning the woman was 
taken to Plymouth Church. At the close of the 
sermon Mr. Beecher turned to her as she sat near the 
pulpit and said, 'Eliza, I wish you would come on 
the platform.' She walked up and stood by his side : 
a beautiful woman with an intelligent face, and as she 
stood there she trembled like a leaf. He turned to 
the congregation and said : 'This woman is a slave, 
and I have promised her owner at New Orleans that 
either she or two thousand dollars, which is her stated 
value, shall be in New Orleans within ten days. Is 
there a father here who has a daughter, is there a 
husband or a brother here who will say that this 
woman shall go back to slavery ? I wish to raise the 
two thousand dollars in this congregation this morn- 
ing.' He had hardly spoken these words before some 
one said, 'I will give one hundred dollars'; another, 
* I will give a hundred,' and another and another, and 
before he put down the names they had subscribed 



BEECHER THE EMANCIPATOR. 245 

over half the amount so rapidly that he could not 
keep count, when Russell Sage rose and said : ' Mr. 
Beecher, I will give the balance whatever it may be.' 
Mr. Beecher turned to the woman and said, ' Eliza, 
you are a free woman.' She sank down in a chair 
upon the platform and wept like a child, while the 
whole congregation was in tears." 

After John Brown's raid into Virginia the tide of 
events swept on rapidly toward the Civil War. In 
1858 had occurred the memorable debate between 
Lincoln and Douglas which brought the future eman- 
cipator into national prominence, and had won the 
intelligent admiration of keen-sighted men, such, for 
example, as James Russell Lowell. In 1859 Mr, Lin- 
coln came to New York and delivered the famous 
address at the Cooper Institute, wherein he showed 
how unbroken was the testimony of the fathers of 
the Republic against the extension of slavery. Mr. 
Beecher met Lincoln at that time. The Illinois lawyer 
attended the services in Plymouth Church and these 
two great leaders of the people dined together at the 
house of a friend. 

The next year, i860, Mr. Lincoln was nominated by 
the Republican National Convention in Chicago. 
Mr. Beecher might easily have been sent as a delegate- 
at-large from New York to that historic Convention, 
but, unlike Mr. Raymond, Governor Morgan, Mr. 
Evarts, and George William Curtis, and the whole 
delegation from the Empire State, he did not favor 
the nomination of Mr. Seward, who seemed to him to 
have more head than heart. Mr. Raymond, a warm 
friend of Beecher's, was one of the delegates to the 
Convention. Overlooking a despatch which one of 



246 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

the representatives of the New York Twies was mak- 
ing ready for that paper, Mr. Raymond drew his pen 
through that part of it which predicted Seward's 
defeat and Lincoln's nomination, and when he had 
changed it he said ; " I would not have Henry Ward 
Beecher read that dispatch for a thousand dollars." 

" One of the first to call upon Mr. Raymond in the 
Times office upon his return from Chicago was Mr. 
Beecher, then in the very prime of mental and physical 
strength. With a laugh that was almost a roar, he 
burst into the editorial-room where Mr. Raymond 
sat, his chair tilted upon its two forelegs, and grasp- 
ing him cordially, heartily, vigorously, said : ' Young 
man, I know the people of this country at heart 
better than you do. Your friend Seward has too 
much head and too little heart to succeed in any such 
crisis as this.* 

" * And yours,' replied Mr. Raymond, * I fear, has 
too much heart and too little head for such a crisis 
as will surely be precipitated.' 

" ' Trust, then,' replied Mr. Beecher, ' in God, and 
keep your powder dry.' " ^ 

Mr. Beecher's labors for the success of the Repub- 
lican nominee in 1856 were not more intense and 
vigorous than his efforts to bring about the election 
of Abraham Lincoln. With pen and tongue he de- 
voted himself to popularizing liberty in the North 
and arousing that conscience and deepening that 
conviction which ultimately gave strength and suc- 
cess to the mighty battle for Liberty and Union so 
soon to be opened by the shot against Sumter. 



Life of Henry Ward Beecher," by Joseph Howard, Jr., p. 277. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

STEERING BY THE DIVINE COMPASS. 

The Republican party were successful. " For the 
first time," as Wendell Phillips said, " the slave had 
elected a President." The crisis hastened on. One 
State after another in the South, by the act of State 
conventions, voted itself out of the Union. Cabinet 
officers and Congressmen left Washington, and aided 
in organizing the Confederate government. All that 
the fathers had built, the work of Washington, and 
the consummate sagacity of Alexander Hamilton, 
seemed falling into ruin. The compromises which 
Henry Clay "and Daniel Webster had championed, 
were bulrushes, torn away by the fierce Niagara of 
secession sentiment and purpose. The right to 
coerce a rebelling State was denied even by influen- 
tial journals at the North, and base and futile com- 
promises were freely advocated by those who felt 
that peace and Union were more precious than any 
surrender of principle, however, infamous and 
cowardly. 

Mr. Beecher's great Thanksgiving sermon for this 
year was a far-sounding trumpet-blast against any 
compromising of principle. Choosing for his text 
the words with which Jesus began His public ministry 
— ^" The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He 
hath anointed Me to preach the Gospel to the poor," 



248 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

he declared that national prosperity is a snare if the 
people are ignorant, the poor are cast down and 
oppression is triumphant. After giving thanks for 
the national mercies of the year, he said that all the 
sons of God rejoice and all good men rejoice. *' The 
Mayor of New York, in a public proclamation, in view 
of this prodigal year, that has heaped the poor man's 
house with abundance, is pleased to say that there is 
no occasion apparent to him for thanksgiving. We 
can ask no more. When bad men grieve at the state 
of public affairs, good men should rejoice. When 
infamous men keep fast, righteous men should have 
thanksgiving. God reigns, and the devil trembles. 
Amen. Let us rejoice ! " * 

After glancing at such reasons for thanksgiving 
as the increasing influence of liberty-loving nations 
in the world, the emergence of the common people 
into power, the resurrection of Italy, the growing 
moderation of the Russian monarchy, the increasing 
vigor of Christian nations, and the reassertion of the 
principles of justice and liberty in America, he said : 
*'The tree of Life, whose leaves were for the healing 
of the nations, has been evilly dealt with. Its boughs 
have been lopped, and its roots starved till the fruit 
is knurly. Upon its top had been set scions of bitter 
fruits, that grew and sucked out all the sap from the 
better branches. Upon its trunk the wild boar of the 
forest had whetted his tusks. 

" But now again it blooms. Its roots have found 
the river, and shall not want again for moisture ; 
the grafts of poisonous fruits have been broken off or 



^ " Patriotic Addresses," p. 226. 



STEERING BY THE DIVINE COMPASS 249 

have been blown out; mighty spearmen have hunted 
the wild swine back to his thickets, and the hedge 
shall be broken down no more round about it. The air 
is fragrant in its opening buds, the young fruit is 
setting. God has returned and looked upon it, and 
behold, summer is in all its branches ! " ^ 

But the preacher saw a threatening and terrible 
background to this beautiful picture of the tree of 
liberty re-budded and full of promising fruit. " The 
clouds lie lurid along the Southern horizon. The 
Caribbean Sea, that breeds tornadoes and whirlwinds, 
has heaped up treasures of storms portentous that 
seem about to break. Let them break ! God has 
appointed their bounds." 

There was no safety for the nation except in cling- 
ing to the great universal principles of truth and 
duty. '^ Vainglory will destroy us. Pride will wreck 
us. Above all, the fear of doing right will be fatal. 
But Justice and Liberty are pilots that do not lose 
their craft. They steer by a Divine compass. They 
know the hand that holds the winds and the storms. 
It is always safe to be right; and our business is not 
so much to seek peace as to seek the causes of peace." ^ 

The nation's prosperity had its beginning and con- 
tinuance in natural laws, and no true prosperity was 
assured if the people set their faces against Divine 
principle. " While papers and parties are in full out- 
cry, and nostrums are advertised, and scared politi- 
cians are at their wits' end (without having gone far, 
either), and men of weak minds are beside themselves, 
and imbeciles stand doubting in the streets, know ye 



* "Patriotic Addresses," p. 228. ^ " Patriotic Addresses," p. 229. 



250 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

that the way of peace is simple, accessible, and easy. 
Be still. Stand firm ! Have courage to wait. Money 
is insane. Fear is death. Faith in justice and in 
rectitude, and trust in God will work oiit safety." 

"Thirty pieces of silver bought Christ, and hung 
Judas. If you sell your convictions to fear, you 
give yourself to a vagabond. If you sell your con- 
science to Interest, you traffic with a fiend. The 
fear of doing right is the grand treason in times of 
danger. When you consent to give up your convic- 
tions of justice, humanity, and liberty, for the sake of 
tranquility, you are like men who buy a treacherous 
truce of tyrants by giving up their weapons of war. 
Cowards are the food of despots. 

"When a storm is on the deep, and the ship labors, 
men throw over the deck-load, they cast forth the 
heavy freights, and ride easier as their merchandise 
grows less. But in our time men propose to throw 
overboard the compass, the charts, the chronometer 
and sextant, but to keep the freight ! " ^ 

In this memorable discourse, Mr. Beecher, as so 
often, argued convincingly by means of illustration. 
He urged the folly of being fearful of excitement, for 
he believed that amongst Christians, civilized people, 
excitement works upward and toward peace. " The 
rush of life, the vigor of earnest men, the conflict of 
realties, invigorate, cleanse, and establish truth. Our 
only fear should be lest we refuse God's work. He 
has appointed this people, and our day, for one of 
those world-battles on which ages turn. Ours is a 
pivotal period. The strife is between a dead past 



'* Patriotic Addresses," pp. 230-231. 



STEERING BY THE DIVINE COMPASS. 25 1 

and a living future; between a v/asting evil and a 
nourishing good; between Barbarism and Civiliza- 
tionr ' 

The North and South must each reap from the 
seed they have sown. ** It is this that convulses the 
South. They wish to reap fruits of liberty from the seed 
of slavery. They wish to have an institution which 
sets at naught the laws of God, and yet be as refined 
and prosperous and happy as we are, who obey these 
laws; and since they cannot, they demand that we shall 
make up to them what they lack." " The Southern 
States, then, have organized society around a rotten 
core — slavery; the North has organized society about 
a vital heart — liberty. At length both stand mature." 
*' The time is come in which they are so brought into 
contact that the principle of the one or the principle 
of the other must yield. Liberty must discrown 
her fair head; she must lay her opal crown and her 
diamond scepter upon the altar of Oppression; or else 
Oppression must shrink, and veil its head and depart. 
Which shall it be ? " " The distinctive idea of the 
free States is Christian civilization, and the peculiar 
institutions of civilization. The distinctive idea of 
the South is barbaric institutions. In the North 
mind, and in the South force, rules." ^ 

Only three courses were possible, either to go over 
to the South, or to compromise principles, or to main- 
tain principles upon just and constitutional grounds 
and abide the issue. The first course was both infa- 
mous and impossible. The North would not change 



* " Patriotic Addresses," p. 232. 

^ " Patriotic Addresses," pp. 233-234. 



252 UENRY WARD BEECHER. 

its convictions, and, for the sake of peace, efface the 
distinctive features of Liberty from its statute-book. 
As to compromising principles, that was going over 
to the South in a meaner way. "We are told that 
Satan appears under two forms : that when he has a 
good, fair field, he is out like a lion, roaring and seek- 
ing whom he may devour ; but that when he can do 
nothing more in that way he is a serpent, and sneaks 
in the grass. And so, it is Slavery open, bold, roar- 
ing, aggressive, or it is Slavery sneaking in the grass, 
and calling itself compromise. It is the same devil 
under either name."' 

He believed in a compromise which meant simply 
forbearance, kindness, a concession in things and not 
in principles, ''only that is not compromise, inter- 
preted by the facts of our past history." Mr. Beecher 
showed that the North wished the South no harm, 
but rather every prosperity; that it was willing to 
give the South all that, by the most liberal construc- 
tion, was put into the original bond. " The Constitu- 
tion gives them liberty to retake their fugitive slaves 
wherever they can find them. Very well. Let them. 
But when the Congress goes beyond the Constitution, 
and demands, on penalty, that citizens of free States 
shall help and render back the flying slave, we give 
a blunt and unequivocal refusal. We are determined 
to break any law that commands us to enslave or re- 
enslave a man, and we are willing to take the penalty. 
But that was not in the original bond. That is a 
parasitic ^z%y laid in the Constitution by corrupt 
legislation or by construction." "No political hand 



* " Patriotic Addresses," p. 235. 



STEERING BY THE DIVINE COMPASS. 253 

shall rob the South. We will defend her coast ; we 
will guard her inland border from all vexations from 
without; and in good faith, in earnest friendship, in 
fealty to the Constitution, and in fellowship with the 
States, we will, and with growing earnestness to the 
end, fulfill every just duty, every honorable agreement, 
and every generous act within the limits of truth and 
honor ; all that and no more, — no more, though the 
heavens fall, — no 7nore, if States unclasp their hands, — 
no more, if they raise up violence against us, no 
MORE ! " ^ 

He showed that the secret intentions of the South- 
ern leaders could not be met by any compromise. 
" What do those men that are really at the bottom of 
this conspiracy mean ? Nothing more nor less than 
this : Southern empire for slavery, and the reopen- 
ing of the slave-trade as a means by which it be fed. 
Free commerce and enslaved work is their motto. 
They will not yet say it aloud. But this is the 
whispered secret of men in Carolina, and men outside 
of Carolina. Their secret purpose is to sweep west- 
ward like night, and involve in the cloud of their 
darkness all Central America, and then make Africa 
empty into Central America, thus changing the moral 
geography of the globe." 

"They mean slavery. They mean an Empire of 
Slavery. They don't any longer talk of the evil of 
slavery. It is a virtue, a religion ! It is justice and 
divine economy ! Slaves are missionaries. Slave- 
ships bring heathen to plantation-Christianity. They 
imagine unobstructed greatness when servile hands 



'Patriotic Addresses," p. 237. 



254 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

shall whiten the plains from the Atlantic to the Pacific 
with cotton. Carolina despises compromise." ' 

" And do you think, poor, simple, peeping sparrow, 
that you can build your poor moss and hair nest of 
compromise on the face of the perpendicular cliff, that 
towers a thousand feet high, with the blackness of 
storms sweeping around its top, and the thunder of a 
turbulent ocean breaking upon its base — and God, 
more terrible than either, high above them, meaning 
Justice and Retribution ! " ^ 

He showed that moral apostasy was the only basis 
on which a compromise satisfactory to the South 
could be built, a compromise that would shut the 
mouth of free speech, cure the intolerance of the 
plantation, and make evil as profitable as good ! 
With magnificent eloquence he pointed out how 
impossible it was to prevent the departure of the 
children of oppression from their house of bondage. 
There was too much light in the North to keep all 
men in slavery. Men would take their lives in their 
hands and risk everything for liberty. "It is of no 
use to tell the South that it shall not be so. It is of 
no use to whisper to them and say, * Your troubles 
shall cease; we will fix this matter to your satisfaction.* 
God never made brick or trowel by which to patch 
up that door of deliverance. By night and by day 
slaves will flee away and escape." 

** I would die myself, cheerfully and easily, before a 
man should be taken out of my hands when I had the 
power to give him liberty, and the hound was after 
him for his blood. I would stand as an altar of 



' "Patriotic Addresses," p. 237. ^ "Patriotic Addresses p. 238. 



STEERING BY THE DIVINE COMPASS. 255 

expiation between slavery and liberty, knowing that 
through my example a million men would live."^ 

" I see that my words are being reported, and as 
free speech may get into Charleston, some men there 
may see what I say, and let me say this to my South- 
ern brethren : We mean to observe the Constitution, 
and keep every compact into which we have entered. 
There are men who would deceive you. They are 
your enemies and ours alike. They would tell lies 
to you, but we will not stand up and indorse them. 
I tell you as long as there are these free States; as 
long as there are hills in which men can hide, and val- 
leys through which they can travel; as long as there 
is blood in the veins, and humanity in the heart, so 
long the fugitive will not want for sympathy and help 
to escape." ^ 

He showed from the history of compromises how 
utterly futile they had been in this prolonged and 
painful controversy between the forces of feeedom 
and slavery, and the only result had been " growing 
demands, growing impudence, growing wickedness, 
and increasing dissatisfaction, until at last excite- 
ments that used to come once in twenty years began 
to come at every ten, and now once in four years, and 
you cannot elect a President strictly according to 
constitutional method without having this Nation 
imperiled, banks shaken, stores overturned, panics 
created, and citizens terrified. You have come to 
that state in which the whole Nation is turmoiled 
and agitated, and driven hither and thither on ac- 
count of the evil effects of compromise." ^ 

^ " Patriotic Addresses," p. 239. ^ " Patriotic Addresses," p. 240. 
^•' Patriotic Addresses," p. 241. 



256 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

He showed that compromise was a desperate shift 
of cowardice, begotten m deceit and ending in anger. 
" Compromises bury troubles, but cannot keep down 
their ghosts. They rise, and walk, and haunt, and 
gibber. We must bury our evils without resurrection. 
Let come what will, — secession, disunion, revolted 
States, and a ragamuffin empire of bankrupt States, 
confederated in the name of liberty for oppression 
or whatever other monstrosity malignant fortune 
may have in store, — nothing can be worse than this 
endless recurring threat and fear — this arrogant dra- 
gooning of the South — this mercantile cringing in the 
North." 

" Shall every quadrennial ejection take place in the 
full fury of Southern threats ? Is the plantation- 
whip to control our ballot-boxes ? Shall Northern 
sentiment express itself by constitutional means, at 
the peril of punishment? Must panic follow elec- 
tion? And bankruptcy follow every expression of 
liberty ? " " The North must accept its own prin- 
ciples, and take the consequences. Manliness 
demands this — Honor demands it. But if we will 
not heed worthier motives, then Interest demands it. 
If even this is not strong enough for commercial 
pusillanimity, then Necessity, inevitable and irresis- 
tible, will drive and scourge us to it ! " ^ 

" Let every good rnan arouse, and speak the truth 
for liberty. Let us have an invincible courage for 
liberty. Let us have moderation in passions, zeal in 
moral sentiments, a spirit of conciliation and conces- 
sion in mere material interests, but unmovable firm- 



Patriotic Addresses," p. 244- 



STEERING BY THE DIVINE COMPASS. 257 

ness for principles; and — foremost of all political 
principles — for Liberty ! " ^ 

What upheld and inspired Mr. Beecher during the 
terrible and unparalleled crisis of the winter of 1860- 
1861, was a strong, unfaltering faith in God, an un- 
doubting confidence that the Union was " not going 
to be broken and shivered like a crystal vase that can 
never be put together again," because he realized 
the presence of God in the National life, because he 
felt that America embodied in her ideal the principles 
of the Christian Gospel. Without expecting any 
satisfactory results from compromise, or from the 
careful explanations which Mr. Lincoln made to the 
South, he did expect that the Nation's institutions, 
even though it might be through concussions, and 
garments rolled in blood, would be settled on right 
and permanent foundations. 



**• Patriotic Addresses," p. 245. 



17 



CHAPTER XXV. 

BEFORE THE GREAT STORM. 

The winter preceding the Avar was the period dur- 
ing which the best life of the great American Re- 
public touched in places its lowest ebb. President 
Buchanan argued before the Congress which con- 
vened in December that the National Government 
possessed no power to coerce a State. The North 
was prolific of compromises, some of them unspeak- 
ably base, offered to the South. Mr. Charles Francis 
Adams, one of the founders of the Republican party, 
and one who gained just celebrity as the Minister of 
the United States at the Court of St. James during 
the war, even proposed that the National Constitu- 
tion be so changed that there should be no subse- 
quent amendment made to it, which had for its object 
any interference with slavery, unless such amend- 
ment originated with a slave State, and secured the 
assent of every State in the Union! It seems to-day 
utterly incredible that one of the founders of the 
party whose purpose was to resist the aggressions of 
slavery, should offer, in the teeth of Southern 
threats, to bind liberty with indissoluble bands, and 
fling her helpless at the feet of her age-long and 
cruel foe! "No Southern man, during the long 
agitation of the slavery question extending, from 



BEFORE THE GREAT STORM. 259 

1820 to i860, had ever submitted so extreme a prop- 
osition as that of Mr. Adams." ^ 

Wendell Phillips, standing like a prophet before 
th^Boston mobs of that winter, and arguing for dis- 
union, was an infinitely nobler spectacle than North- 
ern politicans offering to sell conscience, humanity, 
and justice in order to keep Treason from striking 
the blow which was to launch her slave empire! 

President Buchanan issued a proclamation, appoint- 
ing January 4, 1861, as a day for fasting and prayer. 
That fast marks, it has been well said, " the lowest 
point of degradation the Government of the United 
States ever reached." The sermon which Mr. Beecher 
uttered on that day is one of the most striking and 
stirring pulpit addresses of the century. It deserves 
to take rank with the greatest sermons of all time, 
from the vigor of its thought, the comprehensiveness 
of its perception of the Nation's blameworthiness, the 
moral sublimity of its tone and its magnificent de- 
nunciation of the cowardice that was plunging the 
Republic into ruin. 

He pictured the Nation rolling helplessly in a great 
tempest, and the crew, who had brought the ship 
into danger by pusillanimity and treachery, calling 
on God for deliverance. He showed that the authori- 
ties who had appointed the fast had given sufficient 
reasons by their own deeds for observing it. Even 
to-day Mr. Beecher's words make the reader fairly 
feel the darkness and swirling tornado, thick with 
thunderbolts of war, sweeping from the treacherous 
Caribbean Sea, to overwhelm the Government in dis- 



* Blaine's " Twenty Years of Congress," p. 260. 



26o HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

aster, and irremediable destruction. He makes the 
blood hot, even now, to recall that the Government 
was in peril because Liberty had grown strong, that 
the wildest fanaticism was rampant in the Soi^ih, 
turning cities into camps, threatening civil war, and 
hideous murder and revenges, perpetrating gigantic 
dishonesties, because the South had lost control of 
the National Government, and had determined on 
independence and slave empire, even if the continent 
had to be swept, and desolated by the furies of civil 
strife. 

With solemn earnestness Mr. Beecher called upon 
the people to confess their real sins, to turn from all 
passions, from all thoughts and feelings which could 
not bear the searching inquest of God's awful Judg- 
ment Day, to take solemn account of the vice and 
crime, the perversion of justice, and the great public 
wickedness, the luxury, extravagance, ostentation, 
and corruption of morals for which Northern cities 
were as guilty before God as were the Southern 
States for the gigantic evils of slavery. No Hebrew 
prophet ever flamed with more heat and splendor 
against the horrible wantonness of wide-spread 
avarice and all the bad uses of money, and against 
all the corruptions which, like sea-worms, ocean-bred 
and swarming innumerably, were piercing and 
destroying the stout Ship of State. 

With no disposition to spare the North, he por- 
trayed the national blameworthiness toward the 
Indian, on whom every crime in the calendar of 
wrong had been committed; the wickedness of a 
Christian Nation swindling, chastising, wasting, 
destroying a heathen people, was never made more 



BEFORE THE GREAT STORM. 261 

odious. But when he came to the sin of slavery, the 
most alarming and portentous of all our sins, when 
he portrayed the oppugnant elements of Puritan lib- 
erty and Roman servitude which, for two hundred 
and forty years had grappled in America, when 
he showed that the Constitution had nourished on 
its bosom warring and irreconcilable sins, he spoke 
with an eloquence perhaps never since equaled, an 
eloquence which was just and discriminating, lashing 
the North that loved money more than God and jus- 
tice, the North which, cradled in intelligence and 
liberty, had become confederated with slavery until 
the whole body politic was pervaded with this deadly 
injustice. 

He declared how the North had participated, not 
only in the beginnings but in the subsequent spread 
of oppression; how the public sentiment which, when 
the Constitution was adopted, was favorable to lib- 
erty, had been allowed to subside into an acquies- 
cence with the purposes of slavery, and that, sum- 
moned before the judgment bar of God, the North 
was guilty of having betrayed her stewardship. With 
all the moral power of her pulpit, of her schools and 
colleges, in seventy-five years she had permitted 
liberty to be discrowned and dishonored; the moral 
delinquency had reached the Puritan blood, which 
seemed to him blood touched by the blood of Christ. 
An unparalleled guilt, an astounding sin must be 
laid to the account of the North for the progress and 
peril of slavery. " If this confederacy shall be broken 
up, if the Gulf States shall demand a division of the 
country, and the intermediate States shall go off and 
two empires shall be established, no steward that has 



262 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

lived since God's sun shone on the earth will have 
such an account to render of an estate taken under 
such favorable auspices, as the North will have to 
render of this great national estate which was com- 
mitted to her trust. It is an astounding sin! It is 
an unparalleled guilt! The vengeance and zeal of our 
hearts towards the South might be somewhat tem- 
pered by the reflection that we have been so faithless 
and so wicked." ^ 

It will be hard to find elsewhere any scathing of a 
recreant and apostate pulpit more terribly just than 
that which flames in this powerful discourse. A pul- 
pit teaching the most heathen notions of liberty, so 
perverting popular sentiment that George Washing- 
ton, if living now, would not be able to live one day 
in Charleston and utter the opinions he used to ex- 
press; so corrupting the land that the Chief Magis- 
trate declared that the authors of all the trouble 
were the men who held the doctrines of the Nation's 
fathers in regard to human rights; a pulpit which 
turned the Bible into a covered passage through which 
all the fiends of hell walked in to do mischief upon 
earth; which made the Word of God, as interpreted 
by a besotted priesthood, a bulwark of oppression, 
and hence a strong argument for infidelity; such a 
pulpit was not in spiritual concord and alliance with 
Him who came to earth to proclaim liberty to the 
captives, and to preach the acceptable year of the 
Lord. 

Mr. Beecher, as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes wisely 
said, knew how best to employ his egoisms, his own 



1 " Patriotic Addresses," p. 280. 



BEFORE THE GREAT STORM. 263 

personality in his speaking, and in this mighty out- 
pouring of his head and heart he made a public 
confession of his own sin. He had been indolent, 
he had not been duly active in opposition to slav- 
ery; he mourned his lack of zeal, and confessed his 
share of responsibility in the Nation's sin, and he 
offered his prayer of sincere contrition and penitence 
that he had not been more faithful to liberty and 
religion. 

He believed that the Nation must be tested and 
tried, and if, with holy martyrs and brave confessors, 
they bore true witness for Christ, God would yet 
appear as the leader and captain of their salvation; 
and he closed his magnificent sermon with the prayer 
that the God who loves to forgive and forget might 
hear their cries, pardon the past, inspire the future, 
and bring the Nation to its latter-day glory. 

The terrible winter of 1861 ended, but the opening 
of the springtime was a period of storms, with little 
promise of a peaceful and fruitful summer in the 
Nation's life. The seeds which men had planted were 
seeds of fire. 

" But some day the live coal behind the thought, 

Whether from Baal's stone obscene, 

Or from the shrine serene. 
Of God's pure altar brought, 
Bursts up in flame ; the war of tongue and pen 

Learns with what deadly purpose it was fraught 

And, helpless in the fiery passion caught, 
Shakes all the pillared state with shock of men." 

The cannon-shot was fired against Fort Sumter. 
" On Sunday morning, the 14th of April, it was 



264 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

known that Sumter had surrendered. The scales 
fell from men's eyes ! 

THERE WAS WAR! 

The flag of the Nation had been pierced by men 
who had been taught their fatal skill under its pro- 
tection! The Nation's pride, its love, its honor suffered 
with that flag, and with it trailed in humiliation ! 

Without concert, or counsel, the whole people rose 
suddenly with one indignation to vindicate the 
Nation's honor. It came as the night comes, or the 
morning — broad as a hemisphere. It rose as the 
tides raise the whole ocean, along the whole conti- 
nent, drawn upward by the whole heavens ! 

" The frivolous became solemn ; the wild grew 
stern, the young felt an instant manhood. 

" It was the strangest Sunday that ever dawned 
on Norwood since the Colonial days when, by reason 
of hostile Indians, the fathers repaired to church 
with their muskets! " * 

Again, in writing of this uprising in his story of 
village life in New England, Mr. Beecher said : " Our 
noblest sentiments, when assailed, never deliberate. 
A wise man foreseasons in advance his honor, love, 
purity, patriotism, with reason. When touched with 
harm, they burst forth into action as instantaneously 
as powder touched with fire into flame! When the 
flag was abased the Nation shuddered. No one had 
suspected how deep in the heart of the people was 
the sentiment of patriotism. For two generations 
men had been buying and selling, making and dis- 
tributing, until the dust and shavings of the manu- 



V" Norwood," p. 401. 



BEFORE THE GREAT STORM. 265 

factory seemed to have covered down all heroic sen- 
timents. Long peace and exceeding prosperity had 
shaped popular politics into a greedy game of policy; 
and great principles, no longer debated or tolerated, 
sat in the Capitol, like decrepit old men, crooning of 
the golden days of old. 

"The lowering of the Nation's flag before the guns 
of South Carolina, pierced the pride and honor of the 
North to the quick. The outburst was universal and 
unpremeditated." ^ 

When the bombardment of Fort Sumter occurred, 
Mr. Beecher was under engagement to lecture in Cin- 
cinnati. The lecture committee, however, protested 
that it was not safe for him to deliver his address. Mr. 
Beecher declared, however, that he should speak what 
he had come to say, either indoors or out-doors. But 
the people fearing a riot came in but small numbers. 
He who was to be the voice of the Republic at the 
court of humanity, and especially before the Empire 
of Great Britain, hurried back to Brooklyn. His oldest 
son had already enlisted and returned to his home. 
Mrs. Beecher forbade him leaving the house before 
Mr. Beecher's return. The young man was extremely 
anxious as to what his father would say of his con- 
duct. His first question was : '' Father, may I enlist ? " 
and the swift answer came, " If you don't, I'll disown 
you." 



1 << 



Norwood," pp. 407-408. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

A GREAT LEADER IN A GREAT CRISIS. 

In the momentous struggle which for four years 
shook and desolated the land, Mr. Beecher was 
undoubtedly one of the most potent factors in keep- 
ing the North firm and resolute. During the closely 
contested struggle in the State of New York his 
great influence had contributed greatly to the elec- 
tion of Lincoln. Mr. Frederick Hudson, the able 
journalist, has said of him: *' It is probable that there 
is not another man in the United States who is as 
much heard and read as Henry Ward Beecher, unless 
the other man be Wendell Phillips. These two 
preachers, publicists, and journalists are emphatically 
the greatest men of their kind in the country. . . . 
Every journal at the North throws open its columns 
to them. . . . Where James Gordon Bennett has 
half a million readers for one of his articles, Wendell 
Phillips has one or two millions. While Phillips 
indulges in politics, Beecher is equally successful 
with his religious notions. . . . Are not these two 
men, therefore, the two great editors of the United 
States ? " ^ 

Communication with regard to Mr. Lincoln's Cab- 
inet was opened between Mr. Beecher and the Presi- 



* Howard's " Life of Beecher," pp. 279-280. 



A GREAT LEADER IN A GREAT CRISIS. 267 

dent. But the great Plymouth pastor's real genius 
and wisdom were rareljj conspicuous in his judgment 
of men, while as a popular advocate of great prin- 
ciples and policies he was unsurpassed. It would be 
difficult to find any contemporary record of the war 
that reproduces so vividly the moral agitation, the 
fervent and tumultuous popular feeling, as do Mr. 
Beecher's great sermons, The Battle set in Array, 
The National Flag, The Camp, its Dangers and 
Duties, God in National Affairs, The Success of 
American Democracy, National Injustice and Pen- 
alty, The Grounds and Form of Government, Liberty 
under Laws. 

In his wonderful Star papers published in The 
l7tdependent, of which he became the editor in Decem- 
ber, 1861, we gain a new appreciation of his wisdom as 
a moral leader and his greatness as a Christian prophet 
in the greatest national crisis of our history. We feel 
again the thrill of those momentous times. His words 
throb with the mighty pulse of the great-hearted 
patriot, and they touch our noblest sensibilities to- 
day. They are filled with an enthusiasm of faith, 
with an abundance of moral courage and are fairly 
ablaze with divine hopefulness. 

In the sermon preached April 14, 1861, during the 
siege of Sumter, which had an immense circulation, 
and was read by some preachers from their pulpits as 
the best words for the hour, is one of the noblest ex- 
amples of Mr. Beecher's eloquence. He showed how 
God had raised up great leaders at different exigen- 
cies to bring forth His people. Their courage came 
from moral principle. Moses, Luther, the heroes of 
Dutch independence, and of the Puritan struggle, 



268 HENRV WARD DEECHER, 

were men who had heard God's voice, saying "Go 
forward." They were willing to venture everything, 
endure everything, rather than yield the precious 
truths of which they were the gnardians. " Right 
before us lies the Red Sea of War. It is red indeed. 
There is blood in it. We have come to the very edge 
of it, and the Word of God to us to-day is: ' Speak 
unto this people that they go forward !' " 

After showing that the Federal Government was 
created for justice and liberty, and that from unfore- 
seen causes slavery had swelled to unexpected power, 
and that for the last twenty-five years there had been 
a growing constitutional opposition to oppression, he 
said: "For twenty years of defeat, though of grow- 
ing influence, we have argued the questions of human 
rights and human liberty, and the doctrines of the 
Constitution and of our fathers, and we have main- 
tained that the children should stand where their 
fathers did. At last the continent has consented. 
We began as a handful, in the midst of mobs and 
derision and obloquy. We have gone through the 
experience of Gethsemane and Calvary. The cause 
of Christ among His poor has suffered as the Master 
suffered, again and again and again; and at last the 
public sentiment at the North has been revolution- 
ized."^ 

He believed that the vast majority of the Nation 
were now on the side of American institutions. The 
rebelling States had disowned their country and made 
war upon it. " There has been a spirit of patriotism 
in the North, but never, within my memory, in the 



*" Patriotic Addresses," p. 275. 



A GREAT LEADER IN A GREAT CRISIS. 269 

South. I never heard a man from the South speak 
of himself as an American. Men from the South 
always speak of themselves as Southerners." * 

What a change has come over our national life since 
then. It is the testimony of a distinguished minister 
at the Court of St. James of recent years, that Amer- 
icans traveling abroad, whether they come from 
Maine or Texas, from Massachusetts or Florida, speak 
of themselves as Americans, and not primarily as 
citizens of their particular State. 

" For the first time in the history of this Nation," 
said Mr. Beecher," " there is a deliberate and exten- 
sive preparation for war, and this country has received 
the deadly thrust of bullet and bayonet from the 
hands of her own children." " I hold it is ten thou- 
sand times better to have war than to have slavery. 
I hold that to be corrupted silently by giving up man- 
hood, by degenerating, by becoming cravens, by 
yielding one right after another, is infinitely worse 
than war." " Eighty years of unexampled pros- 
perity have gone far toward making us a people that 
judge of moral questions by their relation to our con- 
venience and ease." " If it please God to wrap this 
Nation in war, one result will follow: We shall be 
called to suffer for our faith." ^ 

He believed that war for nationality and liberty, 
leading the North to suffer for its faith, would lift the 
national life to a holier level. The Nation might re- 
treat from impending strife and secure temporary 
peace by submitting to the dictation of a minority, 



* " Patriotic Addresses," p. 276. 

^" Patriotic Addresses," pp. 277-278. 



270 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

by legalizing the right of any discontented fragment 
to rebel and set up its own authority, or by rewriting 
the Constitution according to the principles of Alex- 
ander Stephens, expurging liberty and enthroning 
slavery. "Take that glorious, flaming sentence in the 
Declaration of Independence, which asserts the right 
of every man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of hap- 
piness, and which pronounces that right to be alike 
inalienable to all, — take that and strike it out and put 
in its place this infernal article of the new Constitu- 
tion of the Southern States, and you can have peace 
— for a little while." " The Southern Churches are 
all sound on the question of the Bible, and infidel on 
the question of its contents ! They believe that this 
is God's Book; they believe that this book is the 
world's charter, and they believe it teaches the relig- 
ion of servitude." ^ 

Purchasing peace by entering into a partnership 
with slavery and the principles of slavery and by 
criminal silence was not at all to Mr. Beecher's mind. 
" Are you prepared to take peace upon these condi- 
tions ? . . . Give me war redder than blood and 
fiercer than fire, if this terrible affliction is necessary, 
that I may maintain my faith in God, in human lib- 
erty, my faith of the fathers in the instruments of 
liberty, my faith in this land as the appointed abode 
and chosen refuge of liberty for all the earth!'"* 

He believed, however, that the time had come to 
cleanse, deepen, and strengthen the just principles of 
the North, to draw lines and choose sides and make 
sharp distinctions between shufflers and brave men. 



^ " Patriotic Addresses," p. 280. ^" Patriotic Addresses," p. 283. 



A GREAT LEADER IN A GREAT CRISIS. 271 

" Thousands, thank God, of great men have spoken 
to us, but I think that the war-voice of Sumter has 
done more to bring men together, and to produce 
unit)' of feeling among them on this subject than the 
most eloquent-tongued orator." It was not a time 
to stop and measure costs, to take counsel of the till, 
and the safe, and the bank. That time was past. The 
infatuated men of the South would not have peace, 
" They are in arms. They have fired upon the Amer- 
ican flag ! That glorious banner has been borne 
through every climate, all over the globe, and for fifty 
years not a land nor people has been found to scorn 
it or dishonor it. At home, among the degenerate 
people of our own land, among Southern citizens, for 
the first time, has this glorious National flag been 
abased, and trampled to the ground! It is for our 
sons reverently to lift it, and to bear it full high again 
to victory and National supremacy." * 

The peace to be aimed at must be built upon im- 
mutable foundations. He urged that the Northern 
feeling should not be vengeful or savage, that a truly 
Christian spirit, such as was maintained by our fathers 
in the Revolutionary struggle, should animate a great 
people in this war of tremendous conflicts. In the 
sublimely eloquent closing words of this great dis- 
course we hear the voice of Milton and the voice of 
Chatham, and the voice of the fathers of the Ameri- 
can Republic. " Let not your children, as they carry 
you to your burial be ashamed to write upon your 
tombstones the truth of your history. Let every man 
that lives and owns himself an American, take the 



» " Patriolic Addresses," p. 285. 



272 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

side of true American principles; liberty for one, and 
liberty for all; liberty now, and liberty for ever; liberty 
as the foundation of government, and liberty as the 
basis of union; liberty as against revolution, liberty 
against anarchy, and liberty against slavery; liberty 
here and liberty everywhere, the world through! 

" When the trumpet of God has sounded, and that 
grand procession is forming; as Italy has risen, and is 
wheeling into the ranks; as Hungary, though mute, is 
beginning to beat time, and make ready for the 
march; as Poland, having long slept, has dreamt of lib- 
erty again, and is waking; as the thirty million serfs are 
hearing the roll of the drum, and are going forward 
toward citizenship, let it not be your miserable fate, 
nor mine, to live in a Nation that shall be seen reeling 
and staggering and wallowing in the orgies of despot- 
ism! We, too, have a right to march in this grand 
procession of liberty. By the memory of the fathers; 
by the suffering of the Puritan ancestry; by the teach- 
ing of our national history; by our faith and hope of 
religion; by every line of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, and every article of our Constitution; by 
what we are and what our progenitors were, — we have 
a right to walk foremost in this grand procession of 
nations toward the bright future." ^ 



» " Patriotic Addresses," p. 288. 



CHAPTER XXVII. 

TOILING FOR LIBERTY AND THE UNION. 

Few men in the North labored so incessantly and 
ardently to maintain the Union cause, to strengthen 
the military forces of the National Administration 
and to induce the President to adopt a radical anti- 
slavery policy as Mr. Beecher. Perhaps there was 
no wiser guiding spirit in the Nation than the great- 
hearted pastor of Plymouth Church, though others 
may justly claim to have exercised a more constant 
and undeviating faith in Mr. Lincoln's wisdom and 
sufficiency for the national crisis. 

Mr. Beecher seemed two different men, the one all 
enthusiasm and earnest conviction, intensely devoted 
to the success of great principles; the other all tender- 
ness toward individual sinners. In the fierce excite- 
ment following the death of Col. Ellsworth he said: 
" When I look at the South, other feelings besides 
those of vengeance are excited within me. Every one 
of those traitors is as wicked as you think, and more. 
The Floyds, the Davises, the Toombses, the Rhetts, 
and all such as they, are more wicked than we know; 
and yet the Lord Jesus Christ is the Saviour held up 
for every such one. They are all immortal, they are 
all, like myself, pilgrims toward the bourne of the 



274 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

eternal. And when I think how many ignorant 
creatures are led by those base men to do wicked 
things, half of the wickedness of which they do not 
know, I feel compassion for them and am sori'y 
for them." 

After describing the turbulent and swelling tide of 
his indignant feeling, when he heard of Col. Ellsworth's 
death, he was almost frightened at his emotions. 
"And I said: 'Suppose my Master should come and 
say: My child, what are you doing with such feel- 
ings ? Where is My teaching ? What are you taking 
on yourself My supreme attribute for ? Vengeance is 
Mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.' Is it not charm- 
ing how these texts will exorcise the Devil ? I put 
that passage on my head as a crown and I have felt 
as peaceful as a lamb ever since." 

" Now, my brethren, I am going to fight this battle 
right straight through from beginning to end, and 
not lose my Christian feelings either. I am going to 
stick close to my Saviour." ^ 

Earnestly sharing^ in the patriotic ardor which 
burned in the North after the firing on Fort Sumter, 
he toiled to make as efficient as possible the forces 
which were to crush the Rebellion. Speaking and 
writing continually, attending military drills, sending 
two of his sons into the field, equipping them with 
horses and arms, preaching in camp, comforting the 
afflicted whose sons had fallen in the fight, turning 
his own home into a store-house for military goods 
and his church into a rendezvous for the soldiers 
who were hastening to the long battle-line which 



^ " Biography," pp. 312-313. 



TOILING FOR LIBERTY AND THE UNION. 275 

Stretched from Fortress Monroe to the Mississippi, 
directing his wife to use his entire salary, beyond the 
necessary household expenditures, in aiding the 
patriotic women of Plymouth Church who were pro- 
viding for the boys at the front, and at last not only 
fitting out two regiments, but undertaking the task 
of the equipment of another, the Long Island 
Volunteers, he radiantly proved his faith by his 
patriotic work and made himself equal to a success- 
ful commander on the field in the reinforcement 
which he brought to the National cause. 

He had given his loving confidence to a personal 
Saviour and was delivered from trembling anxiety in 
regard to his own flesh and blood, exposed to the 
dangers of the battle. Good humored, as full of 
cheer and spiritual life as ever, he imparted of his 
own high and wholesome spirit to a great multitude 
in the North who were his brethren in thinking alike 
concerning the Republic. 

On the day that Plymouth Church contributed 
three thousand dollars to aid in equipping the Brook- 
lyn Fourteenth, he preached one of the most inspir- 
ing of all his sermons, on "The National Flag." 
Two companies of that regiment were among his 
hearers. No better literature for patriotic school- 
books can be found than some parts of this glowing 
sermon. 

" This Nation has a banner, too; and until recently 
wherever it streamed abroad men saw daybreak 
bursting on their eyes. For until lately the American 
flag has been a symbol of Liberty, and men rejoiced 
in it. Not another flag on the globe had such an 
errand, or went forth upon the sea, carrying every- 



276 HENRY WARD I3EECHER. 

where, the world around, such hope to the Captive 
and such glorious tidings. The stars upon it were to 
the pining nations like the bright morning stars 
above, and the stripes upon it were beams of morning 
light. As at early dawn the stars shine forth even 
while it grows light, and then as the sun advances 
that light breaks into banks and streaming lines of 
color, the glowing red and intense white striving 
together and ribbing the horizon with bars effulgent, 
so, on the American flag, stars and beams of many- 
colored light shine out together. And wherever this 
flag comes, and men behold it, they see in its sacred 
emblazonry no ramping lion, and no fierce eagle; no 
embattled castles, or insignia of imperial authority; 
they see the symbols of light. It's the banner of 
Dawn. It means Liberty. 

"If one, then, asks me the meaning of our flag, I 
say to him, it means just what Concord and Lexing- 
ton meant, what Bunker Hill meant; it means the 
whole glorious Revolutionary War, which was, in short, 
the rising up of a valiant young people against an old 
tyranny, to establish the most momentous doctrine 
that the world had ever known, 'or has since known, 
— the right of men to their own selves and to their 
liberties." 

"God Almighty be thanked! that, when base and 
degenerate Southern men desired to set up a nefari- 
ous oppression, at war with every legend and every 
instinct of old American history, they could not do it 
under our bright flag! Its stars smote them with 
light like arrows shot from the bow of God. They must 
have another flag for such work; and they forged an 
infamous flag to do an infamous work, and, God be 



TOILING FOR LIBERTY AND THE UNION, 277 

blessed! left our bright and starry banner untainted 
and untouched by disfigurement and disgrace! I 
thank them that they took another flag to do the 
Devil's work, and left our flag to do the work of God!" 

*' Advanced full against the morning light, and 
borne with the growing and glowing day, it shall take 
the last ruddy beams of the night, and from the At- 
lantic wave, clear across with eagle flight to the 
Pacific, that banner shall float, meaning all the lib- 
erty which it has ever meant! From the North, 
where snows and mountain ice stand solitary, clear to 
the glowing tropics and the Gulf, that banner that 
has hitherto waved shall wave and wave for ever, — 
every star, every band, every thread and fold, signifi- 
cant of Liberty! '"' 

A sermon preached in May, 1861, on " The Camp, 
Its Dangers and Duties," is so wise, comprehensive, 
and pertinent to soldier life, that it might well be 
preached before every military encampment to-day, 
as a preventive of barbarism, an antisepic to corrup- 
tion, an inspiration to patriotism and morality. Mr. 
Beecher's serene faith in the triumph of the good old 
cause found expression in these words: " I have not 
the least doubt as to where victory will issue; I have 
not the least doubt as to which side will triumph. I 
foresee the victory. I rejoice in it, in anticipation; not 
because it is to be on our side, but because it has 
pleased God, in His infinite mercy, to make Liberty 
our side; not because we are North, and they are 
South, but because we have civilization, and they have 
barbarism; because we stand on the principle of 



*** Patriotic Addresses," pp. 290-293. 



278 HENRY WARD DEECIIER. 

equity and liberty, and they stand on the principle of 
slavery and injustice."' 

His Thanksgiving discourse for 1861 on " The 
Modes and Duties of Emancipation," and a sermon 
preached on the first anniversary of the firing on Sum- 
ter, show that thorough study of the problems on 
hand, and that easy grasp of great principles, which 
were then his unconscious preparation for his memo- 
rable embassy to England in 1863. 

In the first of these sermons he strongly urged im- 
mediate emancipation, if that were consonant with 
the legitimate powers of the Constitution. He 
favored no usurpation of power. " This confliict must 
be carried on through our institutions, not over them." 
He believed that emancipation had already begun. 
*' Slaves in the possession of the United States can be 
nothing but men." He showed how the cotton- 
raising South, by rebelling, had encouraged free- 
labor cotton in the West Indies, Africa, India, and 
China. '^ The thunder that rocks us is the calm that 
raises cotton in other lands." 

Emancipation was the goal to which everything 
pointed. He believed also that the great conflict 
would destroy the pestilent heresy of State Sove- 
reignty, and bring the South at last to respect the 
North. *' The people who congregate at our fashion- 
able watering-places are not always the best expo- 
nents of Northern society. The other place where 
the North and South met was in the halls of Con- 
gress; and Heaven forbid that it should be thought 
that the men hitherto there had fairly represented 



* '* Patriotic Addresses," p. 321. 



TOILING FOR IJBERTY AND THE UNION. 279 

Northern virtue or courage! But now we have sent 
a representative body that we are quite willing 
should march through the South to tell them what 
Northern men are, and what Northern men can do. 
By the time our army has gone through the Southern 
States there will be a change in public opinion there 
with respect to the manhood, the courage, the power, 
and the resources of the North." ^ 

In the sermon on the anniversary of Sumter, he 
showed that the year past had been the heroic and 
memorable year of the common people of America. 
They had been possessed by a patriotic excitement, 
not an unreasoning and furious burst of patriotic 
zeal, but a wise, strong, religious, and self-sacrificing 
patriotism. The year had shoAvn that Northern men 
made splendid soldiers, better even than those of the 
South, because of better moral material. He closed 
his discourse with a trumpet peal of faith and exulta- 
tion which might almost have pierced to the shores of 
England. " We will give every dollar that we are 
worth, every child that we have, and our own selves; 
we will bring all we are and all that we have, and 
offer them up freely; but this country shall be one 
and undivided. We will have one Constitution, and 
one Liberty, and that universal. The Atlantic shall 
sound it, and the Pacific shall echo it back, deep an- 
swering to deep, that shall reverberate from the 
Lakes on the North to the unfrozen Gulf on the 
South — ' One Nation, One Constitution, one Starry 
Banner!' Hear it, England, one country and indivis- 
ible! Hear it, Europe, one people and inseparable. 



^ " Patriotic Addresses," p. 338. 



28o HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

One God, one hope, one baptism, one Constitution, 
one Government, one Nation, one country, one peo- 
ple — cost what it may, we will have it!" ^ 

Had it not been that the fire which glowed in these 
words pervaded the whole North, there would have 
been no victory for Freedom in that battle of giants, 
and no paean of triumph, such as Lowell poured forth 
in his great Commemoration Ode at the close of the 
war. 

The six months that followed were a time of great 
disheartenment to the National cause. The noble 
Army of the Potomac, the pride and hope of the 
North, was not led by General McClellan to victory. 
Military disasters made strong men weary of the long 
agony of war. The daily tidings from the front 
delayed hope and made the patriot heart-sick. There 
was no definite emancipation policy yet disclosed by 
the President, and the war lacked moral enthusiasm 
and uplift. Whittier gave immortal expression to the 
agony, and prayer, and faith of those who saw the 
Republic waiting beneath God's furnace blast, " the 
pangs of transformation." 

" O brother ! if thine eye can see 
Tell how and when the end shall be, 
What hope remains for thee and me. 

Then Freedom sternly said : ' I shun 
No strife nor pang beneath the sun, 
Where human rights are staked and won. 

I knelt with Ziska's hunted flock, 
I watched in Toussaint's cell of rock, 
I walked with Sidney to the block. 



* •' Patriotic Addresses," p. 358. 



TOILING FOR LIBERTY AND THE UNION. 28 1 

The Moor of Marston felt my tread, 
Through Jersey's snows the march I led. 
My voice Magenta's charges sped.' " 

Thus, in his vision of The Watchers, he sang of Free- 
dom's colloquy with Peace, and the sad strains end, as 
the vision passed away, in these words of faith: 

" But round me, like a silver bell 
Rung down the listening sky to tell 
Of holy help, a sweet voice fell : 
* Still hope and trust/ it sang; 'the rod 
Must fall, the wine-press must be trod, 
But all is possible with God.' " 

Mr. Beecher urged and urged the National Govern- 
ment to announce a clear, positive anti-slavery pro- 
gramme. Since his editorship of The Independent 
began he had made that journal a leading force in 
the great National struggle. After the capture of 
Mason and Slidell he had written with moderation, 
and yet with great boldness, on " war with England," 
and his words were destined to be perverted and 
turned against him, when he himself appeared in 
England as the advocate of the Union cause. He 
had urged Congress to impose on the people every 
tax which was needed to make the war the most 
effective. He had urged the pulpit to inspire the 
people with a new willingness to make sacrifices for 
the life and glory of the Nation. 

In the summer of 1862 his pen was probably 
mightier than any voice, in making clear to the 
people and to the Government the truth that slavery 
must be destroyed. With a passionate energy of 
remonstrance he wrote against the dilatoriness and 
apparent timidity of the President. 



282 HENRY WARD CEECHER. 

" We have a country. We have a cause. We have 
a people. Let all good men pray that God will give 
us a Government ! " 

" There is no use of concealing it. The people are 
beginning to distrust their rulers — not their good 
nature, their patriotism, their honesty, but their 
capacity for the exigency of military affairs. They 
know that in war an hour often carries a campaign 
in its hand. A day is a year. The President seems 
to be a man without any value of time." 

These judgments were natural enough to «, man 
of Mr. Beecher's prophet-like vision, not charged 
himself with the responsibilities of the President, 
whose great mind surveyed the whole field of the 
Nation's life, and who, when he finally took a step, 
planned to carry with him the consent of the great 
body of the people, many of them sluggish, indiffer- 
ent, and naturally opposed to a vigorous anti-slavery 
policy. 

"The South adjourns every question, and post- 
pones every interest in favor of arms. The North is 
busy with conflicting schemes and interests — and is 
also mildly carrying on a war." 

" Slavery has become a military question. One 
year has changed all things. A remiss and vacillat- 
ing policy of the Administration; the committing of 
the armies of the United States for a whole year to a 
man who thought he was at West Point giving a four 
years' course of instruction to five hundred men 
infinitely at leisure, has changed the relations and 
possibilities of things. It has taken slavery out of 
the realm of discussion, and placed it in the arena of 
war." 



TOILING FOR LIBERTY AND THE UNION. 283 

"Nothing will unite this people like a bold annun- 
ciation of a moral principle. Let the American flag 
be lifted up by Mr. Lincoln, as was the brazen ser- 
pent, and let it be known that every man who looked 
upon it on this continent shall be free, and the tide 
of joy and irresistible enthusiasm will sweep away 
every obstacle." 

" Great God, what a people hast Thou brought 
forth upon this continent! What love of liberty; 
what heroic love of law and institutions; what cour- 
age and constancy and self-sacrifice hast Thou given 
them! and no man is found to lead this so great a 
Nation! Be Thou Leader! Lord God of Hosts, hast 
Thou forgotten how to lead a people? There are no 
ages on Thy head! Years make Thee neither old nor 
weary! Behind thy unwrinkled brow no care dwells! 
Teach this people to heed no other Leader than Thy- 
self! Then, led by Thee, teach them to be all-suffi- 
cient for every need of justice, and omnipotent for 
liberty." 

This prayerful outburst reminds one of certain 
lines on Lincoln in Lowell's great Ode: 

" For him her Old World moulds aside she threw. 
And, choosing sweet clay from the breast 
Of the unexhausted West, 
With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, 
Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true. 

How beautiful to see 
Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, 
Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead." 

**We have been made irresolute, indecisive, and 
weak by the President's attempt to unite impossibili- 
ties; to make war and keep the peace; to strike hard 



284 HKNRY WARD P.EECHKR. 

and not hurt; to invade Southern States and not 
meddle with their sovereignty; to put down rebellion 
without touching its cause." 

" The President has the right and power to destroy 
slavery. Let him account to the civilized world for 
not doing it." 

" Richmond determines, Washington reasons ; 
Richmond is inflexible, Washington vacillates ; Rich- 
mond knows what it wants to do, Washington wishes 
that it knew; Richmond loves slavery and hates 
liberty, Washington is somewhat partial to liberty 
and rather dislikes slavery; rebellion is wise and 
simple. Government is foolish." 

But what an outburst of jubilation rose from Mr. 
Beecher's pulpit and editorial sanctum when the 
President's Proclamation of September, 1862, an- 
nounced that on the first day of the New Year 
slaves in rebelling States were to be thenceforward 
and for ever free. 

" The President's Proclamation will sift the North, 
give unity to its people, simplicity to its policy, 
liberty to its army ! . . . The Proclamation 
emancipates slaves in thrice thirty days. But it 
emancipates the Government and the army to-day." 

*' God may peel me, and bark me, and strip me of 
my leaves, and do as He chooses with my earthly 
estate. I have lived long enough; I have had a good 
time. You cannot take back the blows I have given 
the Devil right in the face. I have uttered some 
words that will not die, because they are incorporated 
into the lives of men that will not die." ^ 



»" Biography," p. 337. 



TOILING FOR LIBERTY AND THE UNION. 285 

In a sermon, preached a few days after Lincoln's 
September Proclamation, on National Injustice and 
Penalty, among other notable things he said that 
infidelity " is refusing to hear God's voice, and to 
believe God's testimony in His providence. There 
are plenty of men who believe in Genesis, and Chron- 
icles, and the Psalms, and Isaiah, and Daniel, and 
Ezekiel, and Matthew, and the other evangelists, and 
the rest of the New Testament clear down to the 
Apocalypse; there are plenty of men who believe in 
the letter of Scripture; and there are plenty of men 
who believe everything that God said four thousand 
years ago; but the Lord God Almighty is walking 
forth at this time in clouds and thunder such as never 
rocked Sinai. His voice is in all the land, and in all 
the earth, and those men that refuse to hear God in 
His own time, and in the language of the events that 
are taking place, are infidels." ^ 

Speaking of what should be the policy of the future, 
he referred to that class of men who believe that the 
remedy for all these evils was to gather together 
about twenty Secessionists and twenty Abolitionists 
and hang them! "I would tell you what hanging 
Abolitionists will do. It will do just exactly what 
would be done if, when a terrible disease had broken 
out on a ship, the crew should kick the doctors over- 
board, and the medicine after them. The disease 
would stay on board and only the cure would go 
overboard. You may rage as much as you please, but 
the men who labored to bring back the voices of the 
founders of this Union; the men whose faith touches 



Patriotic Addresses," p. 276. 



286 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

the original principles of God's Word; the men who 
are in sympathy with Luther; the men that breathe 
the breath that fanned the flame of the Revolution; 
the men who walk in the spirit of the old Puritans; 
the men that are like the first framers of this model 
Republic, — they are the men, if there be any medicine 
yet, by whose hand God will send the cure. Hang 
them ? That was the medicine that the Jews had 
when they crucified Christ. The Lord of Glory was 
put upon an ignominious tree and they thought they 
would have peace in Jerusalem! " * 

On the first of January, 1863, President Lincoln 
issued a proclamation which filled the North with a 
new hope, that proclamation on which he invoked 
not in vain the considerate judgment of mankind and 
the gracious favor of Almighty God. Eighteen hun- 
dred and sixty-three was the year of Vicksburg and 
Gettysburg and the greatest year in Mr. Beecher's 
life, for then he finished, as Dr. Holmes well said, " a 
more remarkable embassy than any envoy who has 
represented us in Europe since Franklin pleaded the 
cause of the young Republic at the court of Ver- 
sailles." 



* " Patriotic Addresses," p. 377. 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 

" YOU WONDER WHY WE'RE HOT, JOHN ? " 

Mr. Beecher's visit to England, in 1863, was an 
international event. His service to the cause of 
liberty and of the American Union was also a service 
to all the English-speaking nations which are bound 
together by so many of the strongest ties. The 
lion-like courage, the lightning wit, the invincible 
good nature, the marvelous pluck and perseverance, 
the mastery of the complicated case in hand in all its 
details, the glowing patriotism, the fiery indignation, 
the intense love for what was best in Old England, 
the ardent Christian convictions, vitalizing and 
inspiring every sentence, and lifting the American 
ambassador of freedom to heights of noble eloquence 
rarely equaled in the annals of English oratory, 
make this episode in Mr. Beecher's life a page of his- 
tory destined to be lustrous through many generations. 

Worn out by his toils, which had been almost 
uninterrupted since Lincoln's election in t86o, sharing 
in all of the vast excitements of the first two dreadful 
years of the Civil War, Mr. Beecher decided, in the 
summer of 1863, that two or three months spent in 
Europe would add to his future ability to serve the 
Nation at home. 

Accompanied by Dr. John Raymond, President of 
Vassal- College, and Rev. Dr. Holme, he embarked for 



288 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

England, his Church agreeing to pay all of his 
expenses. Mr. Beecher was not sent by the Govern- 
ment. Secretary Seward was not his friend. The 
great-hearted Lincoln loved and admired him, and, 
according to one report, deemed him the greatest of 
living Americans. But he had criticised the President 
so severely and constantly that he supposed that 
Lincoln " took no stock " in him. 

Arriving in England, and finding the public feeling 
bitterly hostile to the Union cause, he would not 
speak there, and would not permit any one to pay a 
penny of his expenses. Furthermore, he would not 
enter the house of any man who was not known to be 
a friend of the North in its great conflict. 

He has stated that, lying on his back, as the ship 
was going over, uncomfortably sick nearly all the 
way, he spoke thus to himself : " * I have no doubt 
whatever of the final success of this cause, and I am 
perfectly certain that slavery is going with it. I have 
been, for at least twenty-five or thirty years, studying 
the Constitution of the United States, the history of 
the debates, and laying up all manner of material for 
discussion on the subject of slavery, and now we have 
got so far along that this question,.! suppose, is 
settled, and all this material must go to profit and 
loss. I shall never want to use it again; so let it go.' 
Whereas, in point of fact, all these accumulations and 
investigations were brought about by direct Provi- 
dence in an unforeseen way, as it were, to enable me 
to go through the campaign that I afterward entered 
into in England." ^ 



» " Life of Beecher," p. 163. 



*' YOU WONDER WHY WE'rE HOT, JOHN ? " 289 

He was met at the Mersey by a Manchester commit- 
tee with a request for him to lecture, but he had made 
up his mind not to speak in England. A personal friend 
of his. Rev. Dr. Campbell, had said before his arrival 
that Mr. Beecher had come to Europe to enjoy him- 
self, while his country was in sore distress, and that 
he was greatly mistaken in thinking that he could 
twist the English public around his fingers as easily 
as he did the Americans. 

After all, Mr. Beecher did speak in Glasgow at a 
temperance breakfast, with the understanding that 
nothing should be reported, although his speech ap- 
peared in all of the papers. He also addressed one 
hundred and fifty Congregational clergymen in Lon- 
don, whom he rebuked for their want of sympathy 
with the cause of American nationality and freedom. 
This address was pronounced by Dr. Henry Allon the 
best of Mr. Beecher's speeches. He was greatly dis- 
appointed to find that the English Independents 
were not to be leaned upon. They said that they sym- 
pathized with liberty, but " they sympathized with 
liberty exactly as an icicle sympathises with sunlight 
in summer — it chills you to go near it." He found 
the deepest ignorance in regard to American affairs 
and institutions among people where he had a right, 
as he felt, to expect more intelligence. Of all men he 
was the best fitted to elucidate and disentangle the 
dark and perplexed problems which were then dis- 
tracting the Old World and the New. "An American 
State question," as Oliver Wendell Holmes has said, 
" looks as mysterious to an English audience as an 
ear of Indian corn wrapped up in its sheath, to 
an English wheat-grower. Mr. Beecher husks it 

19 



290 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

for them as only an American born and bred can 
do."^ 

Among the things which most annoyed him in 
Great Britain was England's hypocritical antipathy 
to war, that is, war with the South. At the reception 
given to him on his return to Brooklyn, he said: ''No- 
where else in the world is there so tender a con- 
science on the subject of war as England has — when 
she is not waging it. She has only three wars now, I 
believe, on hand, — in Japan, China, New Zealand, 
Australia, or somewhere — and the rest of her leisure 
she occupies with a profound regret at war! If it was 
for a ship at sea, she was ready to go to war WMth us; 
if it was for a territory on the Antarctic Ocean, she 
was ready to go to war with the savages; if to open 
trade, she had no objection to burn down a town of 
a hundred thousand inhabitants; but when a people 
are making war for their own life, for everything 
that dignifies humanity, England stands wondering 
at God's patience with men that will make war." "^ 

He learned, as never before, that England, as rep- 
resented by her nobility, dreaded the growing influ- 
ence of American institutions. " As a class they are 
against us, and for most obvious reasons. We are 
not accustomed to estimate the effect of our example 
upon European institutions. When he takes his 
walk abroad, it is not the elephant that weighs and 
measures his own gravity as he treads on tlie field- 
mouse's tail. It is the mouse that meditates. And 
for such a gigantic nation as this, on such a continent 
as this, while we are treading the steps of accom- 



Patriotic Addresses," p. 426. "^ " Patriotic Addresses," p. 663, 



'* YOU WONDER WHY WE'RE HOT, JOHN ? " 29I 

plishing history, we do not feel the jar we ourselves 
make." He quotes the Saturday Review^ that brilliant 
and " unprincipled paper," as having the frankness to 
say that English criticisms were not made because 
they disliked us, but because they found our ideas 
and examples working in Great Britain, and they 
were forced, in order to defeat those ideas in England, 
to attack us in America. 

In his oration upon Abraham Lincoln, George 
Bancroft said: ''Aristocracy had gazed with terror 
on the growth of a commonwealth where freeholds 
existed by the million, and religion was not in bondage 
to the State; and now they could not repress their 
joy at its peril." " No dynasty," wrote Dr. Holmes, 
" can look the fact of successful, triumphant self- 
government in the face without seeing a shroud in 
its banner and hearing a knell in its shouts of vic- 
tory." While the English sovereign was a wise and 
judicious friend of the national cause, and while the 
late Prince Consort had been a fast friend of America, 
Mr. Beecher discovered that the mass of the English 
nobility were hostile. 

Resisting the invitations of the Anti-Slavery Union 
to make speeches in the principal cities, he hurried to 
the continent in a towering rage. He had found 
nearly all the leading men in public and professional 
life, many of the Quakers, and nearly everybody who 
rode in a first-class car, thoroughly hostile to the 
American cause, while most of the Congregational 
ministers of Great Britain, excepting those in Wales, 
were either lukewarm or sympathetic with the South. 



1 << 



Patriotic Addresses," p. 664. 



292 HENRY WARD BEECHER, 

*'I found that on the railways, on the boats, in the 
hotels, wherever there was a traveling public, there 
was a public that sympathized with the South and 
was adverse to. the North." "No man," he said, 
"ever knows what his country is to him until he has 
gone abroad and heard it everywhere denounced and 
sneered at. I had ten men's wrath in me, and my 
own share is tolerably large, at the attitude assumed 
all around me toward my country."^ 

Here we have one proof of Mr, Gladstone's famous 
declaration that " in England the masses have usually 
been right and the classes have usually been wrong." 
At the close of his address, given at the reception in 
Brooklyn on his return, Mr. Beecher did full justice 
to those brave Englishmen of eminence who, though 
a small minority, did stand by the noblest traditions 
of English history during those fierce and fateful 
years when England, as never before or since, was 
divided over a question that was not immediately a 
part of her own politics. 

The spirit of '76, the fiery patriotism that had come 
down to him through generations of elect men, and 
which was associated with every fiber of his manhood, 
with every Christian conviction of his soul, and with 
every atom of his vast hope for humanity — all this 
was tugging at his heart, and yet he determined to 
remain silent. 

For several months he traveled through France, 
Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and came back to Paris. 
He enjoyed again the rich art treasures of Europe, 
and his spirit was refreshed by the Swiss scenery, and 

»"Life,"p. 166. 



" YOU WONDER WHY WE'rE HOT, JOHN ? " 293 

diverted from the national agony which had almost 
worn him out. 

Mrs. Stowe reports that he had a period of special 
enjoyment in Berlin, where, in the Museum, under 
the instruction of the Director of Arts, he carefully 
examined the historical collections, so ample and so 
scientifically arranged, which mark the development 
of European art. Dr. Storrs, in his eloquent address 
of welcome on Mr. Beecher's return, said: " The rest 
and leisure of those weeks upon the Continent pre- 
pared him not only to face the rough seas that have 
delayed his return but to meet and master the more 
tempestuous savagery of the Liverpool mob. The 
Alpine peaks to whose summit he climbed contrib- 
uted, no doubt, to lift him afterward to the climax of 
his eloquence at London and at Manchester." ^ 

The news of the surrender of Vicksburg came to 
him in Paris on Sunday morning, and he walked to 
the church on air. Taking a seat in the pew of the 
American Minister, Mr. Dayton, he told Mr. Dayton's 
daughter, and a friend of Miss Dayton's, who was in 
the seat with her, the great news. The scene that 
followed is worth repeating in his own words. 
" Then we rose up when the hymn was given out. 
She stood at my side and began to sing, and as she 
finished one line she broke into a flood of tears 
and down she sat, and down sat the other, and 
they just shook they were so overwhelmed with 
feeling." ^ 

But the news of Gettysburg came also on the same 
blessed Sunday, and in his elation Mr. Beecher called 



* " Biography," p. 437. '^ " Life," p. 167. 



294 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

a cab and hurried with the glorious tidings to Mr. 
Dayton's house. 

" In the Grand Hotel there was a great glass-cov- 
ered court, and, as I would stand at the landing and 
look down, there would always be a group of South- 
erners in the left-hand corner. It had come to be a 
resort of theirs, and there were ever so many there. 
Up to this time, when I had walked through, I would 
be insulted in every way by whistles and sneering 
remarks, etc., and they would tell the servants to 
carry messages to me which I learned afterward the 
proprietor would not allow to be sent. As I went in 
this day of the double victory, there they sat, a dozen 
or fifteen of them. I had never taken any notice of 
them hitherto, not the least, but after I got this news 
I walked in and strode right down in front of them 
without saying a word, but carrying my head high, 
I can tell you, and went upstairs to my room. I never 
saw one of them afterwards, and I was there myself 
several days." ^ 

Returning to England, he was again urged to make 
speeches, but he replied, " No, I am going home in 
September; I do not want to have anything more to 
do with England." But the friends of America finally 
changed his mind by showing him what sacrifices 
they had made for the national cause, and that if he 
refused them his help, the enemies of the North 
would say, " Even your friends in America despise 
you." It must have been a hard struggle when a 
cause, supported and defended by John Bright, John 
Stuart Mill, the Duke of Argyle, Richard Cobden, 



1 •* Life," p. 167-168. 



"you wonder why we're hot, JOHN?" 295 

W. E. Foster, Goldwin Smith, Prof. Cairns, Mr. 
Thomas Hughes, George Thompson, and a score of 
eminent Englishmen besides, felt the need of such 
reinforcement as an American orator could bring 
them. 

Furthermore, Mr. Beecher learned that there was a 
movement on foot to hold great meetings among the 
non-voting masses in order to bring about a change 
in their feelings. He learned that these non-voting 
friends of the North, some of whom like the cotton- 
spinners of Lancashire, had seen their children 
starving and in rags about them, rather than lift one 
finger for slavery or do one thing to antagonize the 
cause of free labor, were an immense political power 
respected by the aristocracy and the Government. 

It was fear of the great, true, democratic heart of 
the English common people that had kept Parlia- 
ment from declaring for the Confederacy. The spirit 
of liberty was not dead in the non-voting masses, and 
all efforts to hold popular meetings in behalf of slav- 
ery had thus far been unsuccessful. Mr. Cobden had 
said of the English common people that they had an 
instinctive feeling that their cause was bound up in 
the prosperity of the United States. 

America had felt, with keen agony, that the moral 
sympathy of England had been given to the South 
and to slavery, and the Northern feeling against 
Great Britain was intense. 

" You wonder why we're hot, John } 
Your mark waz on the guns. 
The neutral guns that shot, John, 
Our brothers an' our sons. 



296 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Ole Uncle S., sez he, I guess 
There's human blood, sez he. 
By fits and starts in Yankee hearts. 
Though 't may surprise J. B. 
More'n it would you an' me." 

" The denial of moral sympathy in Great Britain," 
said Mr.. Beecher, " was accompanied by the most 
active exertions of certain parts of the British people 
in behalf of the South; so much so that I think it 
will scarcely be doubted by any man that if the ship- 
yards, the foundries, the looms, and the shops of 
Great Britain had refused their succor to rebellion, 
the rebellion would have died out in the Nation long 
ago." ^ 

The English Government would have been eager 
to espouse the Southern cause had it not been that 
the English masses were still true to America and 
freedom. It was shown Mr. Beecher that he had a 
mission in helping to keep the popular heart of 
England loyal to its own best convictions. America 
and the better England will always be grateful that 
he finally yielded to the importunate arguments of 
the brave and enlightened friends of the North. His 
service in strengthening the right-minded elements 
among the English people and in heading off the 
incalculable mischiefs which were planned, can 
scarcely be overestimated. 



* " Patriotic Addresses," p. 659 



CHAPTER XXIX. 

CONQUERING THE MOB, 

Meetings were arranged for Manchester, Glasgow, 
Edinburgh, Liverpool, and London. During the 
time preceding his opening speech, Mr. Beecher was 
in one of his most despondent and afflicted moods. 
There was an unusual deal of excitement in Man- 
chester over the approaching event. A storm was 
brooding. The streets were placarded with out- 
rageous posters " full of all lies and bitterness." 
Some of the placards were in blood-red letters. The 
friends who met Mr. Beecher were greeted by him 
with this question: "Are we going to back down?" 
They said " No," and inquired how he felt about it, 
and were made happy to hear him say, " I am going 
to be heard, and if not now, I am going to be by and 
by." 

After preparing the notes for his first speech, Mr. 
Beecher passed through one of those horrible experi- 
ences of darkness and agony to which his mind was 
occasionally subject. He felt that he would utterly 
fail before an English audience in the advocacy of 
the cause intrusted to him, and his morbid suffer- 
ings became terrible beyond conception. In recalling 
this experience he said: "I think I never went 
through such a struggle of darkness and suffering in 



298 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

all my life as I did that afternoon. It was about 
the going down of the sun when God brought me to 
that state in which I said, 'Thy will be done; I am 
willing to be annihilated; I am willing to fail if the 
Lord wants me to; I give it all up to the hands of 
God,' and rose up in a state of peace and of serenity 
simply unspeakable, and when the coach came to take 
me down to Manchester Hall I felt no disturbance 
nor dreamed of anything but success." 

No one can rightly understand some of the later 
experiences of Mr. Beecher's life who does not realize 
into what depths his spirit sometimes sank, and to 
what heights it often suddenly rose with a divine 
resilient energy. Writing to a friend ten days later 
he could say, " I have had the sweetest experience of 
love to God and man of all my life." 

"God awakened in my breast the desire to be a true 
and full Christian towards England the moment I put 
foot on her shores." 

" I had at Liverpool and Glasgow as sweet an 
inward peace as ever I had in any of the loving meet- 
ings in dear old Plymouth Church." 

" And again and again when the uproar raged and 
I could not speak, my heart seemed to be taking the 
infinite fulness of the Saviour's pity and breathing it 
out on those poor troubled men." 

" I have had no disturbance of personality. I have 
been willing, yea, with eagerness, to be myself con- 
temptible in men's sight if only my disgrace could be 
to the honor of that cause which is intrusted to our 
own dear country." 

" There passes before me a view of God's glory, so 
pure, so serene, uplifted, filling the ages, and more and 



CONQUERING THE MOB. 299 

more revealed, that I almost wish to lose my own 
identity, to be a drop of dew that falls into the sea 
and becomes a part of the sublime whole that glows 
under every line of latitude and sounds on every 
shore." 

" And in all this time I have not had one unkind 
feeling toward a single human being. Even those 
who are opposers I have pitied with undying compas- 
sion, and enemies around me have seemed harmless 
and objects of charity rather than potent foes to be 
destroyed." ' 

It is evident that a man capable of passing through 
such experiences was liable to pass through others in 
which his words could not wisely be judged by the 
ordinary standaj*ds of average men. 

His speech in Manchester was delivered October 
9th. When he reached the hall the vast crowd was 
already tumultuous, but he felt victory in his blood. 
The Chairman introduced him as one of the American 
heroes, and, much to his amusement, called him the 
Rev. Henry Ward Beecher Stowe ! About six thou- 
sand persons were present, and among them partisans 
of the Southern cause. The deafening cheers with 
which Mr. Beecher was received were followed by 
hisses. He said, in recalling the experiences of that 
night, " As soon as I began to speak the great 
audience began to show its teeth, and I had not gone 
on fifteen minutes before an unparalleled scene of con- 
fusion and interruption ensued. No American who 
has not seen an English mob can form any concep- 
tion of one. This meeting had a very large multitude 



* " Men of Our Times," pp. 560-563. 



300 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

of men in it who came there for the purpose of destroy- 
ing the meeting and carrying it the other way when 
it came to a vote." ^ 

He measured his audience, and came to the con- 
clusion that one-fourth of them were opposed to him 
and one-fourth were sympathetic, and that his proper 
plan would be to appeal to the great middle section, 
who were uncommitted. " How to do this was a 
problem. The question was who could hold out the 
longest. There were five or six storm centers boil- 
ing and whirling all at one time; here some one pound- 
ing on a group with his umbrella, and shouting, 'Sit 
down there ' ; over there a row between two or three 
combatants ; somewhere else a group all yelling to- 
gether at the top of their voices. It was like talking 
to a storm a sea." ^ 

In another account of his experience with English 
mobs he said : " I had to speak extempore on sub- 
jects the most delicate and difficult as between our 
two nations, where even a shading of my words was 
of importance, and yet I had to outscream a mob, 
and drown the roar of a multitude. It was like driv- 
ing a team of runaway horses and making love to a 
lady at the same time." ^ 

In his Manchester experience Mr. Beecher was 
getting ready for Liverpool. He threw away his 
notes, and, with perfect self-possession and perfect 
good temper, put his whole force into the tremen- 
dous conflict. " The uproar would come in on this 
side and on that, and they would put in insulting ques- 



1 •• Life." p. 171. 2 '.Life," p. 172. 

' Mrs. Stowe's " Men of Our Times," p. 560. 



CONQUERING THE MOB. 301 

tions and all sorts of calls to me, and I would wait 
until the noise had subsided, and then get in 
about five minutes of talk. The reporters would 
get that down, and then up would come another 
noise." ^ 

After the first interruption he said: ''My friends, 
we will have a whole night's session, but we will be 
heard. I have not come to England to be surprised 
that those men, whose cause cannot bear the light, are 
afraid of free speech." Mr. Beecher was immensely 
amused by some things which occurred, and once 
could not refrain from laughing outright. " The au- 
dience stopped its uproar, wondering what I was 
laughing at, and that gave me another chance, and I 
caught it." 

With great skill he linked the American cause to 
that of civil and religious liberty the world over, and 
especially with that which is best in English history. 
" I covet no higher honor than to have my name 
joined to the list of that great company of noble 
Englishmen from whom we derived our doctrines of 
liberty."^ 

What were called American ideas were simply Eng- 
lish ideas bearing fruit in America. 

"We bring back American sheaves, but the seed 
corn we got in England: and if, on a larger sphere 
and under circumstances of unobstruction, we have 
reared mightier harvests, every sheaf contains the 
grain that has made old England rich for a hundred 
years." We are not surprised that such words were 
followed by great cheering. 



Life," p. 172. 2 «< Patriotic Addresses," p. 439. 



302 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Alluding to the words that he had spoken in Amer- 
ica which had given offense in England, he said: "I 
have had one simple, honest purpose which I have 
pursued ever since I have been in public life, and that 
was with all the strength that God has given me to 
maintain the cause of the poor and weak in my 
country, and, if in the heightened heat of conflict, 
some words have been over-sharp, and some positions 
have been taken heedlessly, are you the men to call 
one to account? What if some exquisite dancing- 
master, standing on the edge of a battle where Richard 
Coeur de Lion swung his axe, criticised him by say- 
ing that his gestures and postures violated the pro- 
prieties of polite life! When dandies fight they think 
how they look, but when men fight they think only 
of deeds." He disclaimed being there either on trial 
or on defense. 

" I have never ceased to feel that war or even un- 
kind feelings between two such great nations would 
be one of the most unpardonable and atrocious of- 
fenses that ttie world ever beheld, and I have regarded 
everything that needlessly led to those feelings out 
of which war comes as being in itself wicked." ^ 

He showed that American resentment against Eng- 
land was greater than against France, because Amer- 
ica had so much in common with the English people. 
Love toward England had been growing, and Eng- 
land's conduct offended Ameria more than that of 
France. If intemperate words had been spoken 
against England, they were uttered in the mortifica- 
tion of disappointed affection. What America ex- 



^ •' Patriotic Addresses," pp. 440-441. 



CONQUERING THE MOB. 303 

pected of liberty-loving England was moral sympathy 
and nothing more. 

He had no doubt about the issue of the conflict. 
Population, wealth, intellect, and justice were with 
the Noftth, and before long one thing more would be 
added — victory. He showed that the conflict between 
the two sections in America was between liberty and 
slavery, and that hence the popular sympathy of Eng- 
land must be with the North when the facts became 
known. 

The address at Manchester was largely a history of 
the political movements which had gone on for half a 
century and which resulted in a division over the sub- 
ject of slavery. He acknowledged that the North 
had not been utterly free from complicity with op- 
pression. 

"For years together New York has been as much 
controlled by the South, in matters relating to slavery, 
as Mobile or New Orleans. But, even so, the slave- 
trade was clandestine. It abhorred the light; it crept 
in and out of the harbor stealthily, despised and hated 
by the whole community. Is New York to be blamed 
for demoniac deeds done by her limbs while yet 
under possession of the devil ? She is now clothed, 
and in her right mind. There was One Judas: is 
Christianity therefore a hoax? There are hissing 
men in this audience: are you not respectable? The 
folly of the few is the light which God casts to irra- 
diate the wisdom of many." 

Punctured by cheers, laughter, hisses, and cries of 
" Hear," the oration proceeded. After defending the 
Constitution as an anti-slavery document, he showed 
how the laws of the slave States treated slaves, not as 



304 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

human beings, but as " chattels," which is the same 
word as " cattle," with the " h " left out, the difference 
being between quadruped and biped. The Constitu- 
tion spoke of slaves as " persons," the laws of the 
slave States called them " things." • 

" Go to Mississippi, the State of Jefferson Davis, 
and her fundamental law pronounces the slave to be 
only a 'thing'; and again the Federal Constitution 
sounds back ' persons.' Go to Louisiana and its Con- 
stitution, and still the doctrine of devils is enunciated — 
it is ' chattel,' it is * thing.' Looking upon those for 
whom Christ felt mortal agony in Gethsemane and 
stretched himself out for death on Calvary, their laws 
call them ' things* and * chattels' ; and still in tones 
of thunder the Constitution of the United States says 
* persons.' " ^ 

How keenly he depicted the evil effects on morality 
which the growing profitableness of slavery had pro- 
duced ! The great demand for cotton throughout 
the world, and the invention of the cotton-gin, sent 
up the price of slaves. " Slaves that before had been 
worth from three to four hundred dollars, began to 
be worth six hundred; that knocked away one-third 
.of the adherence to the moral law. Then they became 
worth seven hundred dollars, and one-half the 
law went; then eight and nine hundred dollars, and 
then there was no such a thing as moral law; then 
one thousand or twelve hundred dollars, and slavery 
became one of the beatitudes."^ 

After a rapid and pointed history of the American 
slavery contest he turned his quick fire on the attempt 



* " Patriotic Addresses," p. 448. ^ " Patriotic Addresses," p. 449. 



CONQUERING THE MOB. 305 

to make England believe that war had nothing to do 
with slavery. " It had to do with nothing else.** 
"Against this withering fact — against this damning 
allegation — what is their escape ? They reply, ' The 
North is just as bad as the South.' Now we are 
coming to the marrow of it. If the North is as bad 
as the South, why did not the South find it out before 
j'-ou did ? If the North had been in favor of oppress- 
ing the black man, and just as much in favor of 
slavery as the South, how is it that the South has 
gone to war with the North because they believe to 
the contrary ?" 

Mr. Beecher paid some attention to the credulous 
president of the Society for Southern Independence, 
Lord Wharncliffe, who was laboring to remove the 
erroneous impression that the efforts of the South 
tended " to support the existence of slavery! " That 
such silliness as Lord Wharncliffe represented was 
believed by any large portion of English society is an 
evidence of the extremes to which prejudice and mis- 
representation may be carried. Mr. Beecher's expo- 
sure of his lordship's folly was as complete and lumin- 
ous as a sunburst and at times as terrific as a sheaf of 
forked lightnings. 

In this speech he struck down Lord Brougham's 
objection, a very common one in England at that 
time, that the North was fighting for the Union and 
not for emancipation. The Union administered by 
Northern men would work out emancipation. The 
maintenance of the Union was the best way to secure 
to the African his rights. 

"The North was like a ship carrying passengers, 
tempest tossed, and while the sailors were laboring 
20 



3o6 HENRY WARD EEECHER. 

and the captain and officers directing, some of the 
grumblers came up from amongst the passengers and 
said: * You are all the time working to save the ship, 
but you don't care to save the passengers.' I should 
like to know how you would save the passengers so 
well as by taking care of the ship." ^ 

An interruption was made at this point by the 
Chairman to announce that the Government was to 
seize and detain in Liverpool the rams prepared to 
assist the South. After the cheering had ceased Mr. 
Beecher, making no reference to the interruption, 
continued along the line of his argument and spoke 
some grand words about the colored regiments, who, 
fighting for liberty, were proving the manhood of the 
African race. 

This speech was reported in the chief papers of the 
Kingdom and it was discovered that Mr. Beecher was 
not to be put down by the mob. He had made up 
his mind that England was to hear him. Since 
Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Mr. Beecher had not 
sunk even occasionally into those hours of despond- 
ency in regard to the Nation. Before coming to 
Great Britain he had felt that the National cause was 
in the extremest peril. He said, "We had at that 
time converted almost every sea-going craft into a 
man-of-war, and this blockade was in the main well 
served. Europe stood watching as a vulture does to 
see the sick lamb or kine stagger and fall, and from 
her dry branch of observation she is ready to plunge 
down. Napoleon did. He had already sent French 
armies into Mexico. That was a mere preface. 



* " Patriolic Addresses," p. 463. 



CONQUERING THE MOB. 307 

Mexico was not his final object. The recovering 
again of territory that had once belonged to France 
lay in the achievements and expectations of this weak 
and wicked potentate in the future. In this condi- 
tion of things we were hovering on the very edge of 
intervention. It was well known, by those acquainted 
with the condition of affairs in other lands, that 
Napoleon was disposed by every art and intrigue to 
persuade the Government o^ Great Britain to inter- 
pose, to break the blockade and to give its moral 
support to the rebellion of the South." ^ 

He had found in England almost universal skepti- 
cism as to the success of the North. He was every- 
where told, " You will never subdue the South," and 
he always answered, " We shall subdue the South." 
In this spirit he went to work to subdue England, for 
he felt that it was of the utmost importance that 
right views should prevail, and that the secret hopes 
and wishes of the ruling English classes should get 
no support from the English masses, 

" As martyrs coin their blood, he coined his breath 
And dimmed the preacher s in the patriot's fame." 



In describing his own experience after that tre- 
mendous first night in Manchester he said: " Nobody 
knows better than I do what it is to feel that every 
interest that touches the heart of a Christian man, and 
a patriotic man, and a lover of liberty, is being 
assailed wantonly, to stand between one nation and 
your own and feel that you are in a situation in which 
your country rises or falls with you. And God was 



1 «« 



Biography," p. 399. 



3C8 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

behind it all: I felt it and I knew it, and when I got 
through and the vote was called off you might have 
thought it was a tropical thunder-storm that swept 
through that hall as the * Ayes ' were thundered, 
while the * Noes ' were an insignificant and contempt- 
ible minority. It had all gone on our side, and such 
enthusiasm I never saw." ^ 

» ^' Life," p. 174. 



CHAPTER XXX. 

THE HEART OF BRUCE RETURNS TO SCOTLAND. 

At Glasgow, on the 13th of October, he gave his 
second address. Perhaps it would be wiser to say, 
with Dr. Holmes, that he made a single speech in 
Great Britain, delivering it piecemeal in different 
places. Beginning with an impassioned eulogy of 
Scotland, he thrilled and magnetized the crowded 
Glasgow audience. " No one who has been born and 
reared in Scotland can know the feeling with which, 
for the first time, such a one as I have visited this 
land, classic in song and in history. I have been 
reared in a country whose history is brief. So vast is 
it, that one might travel night and day for a week and 
yet scarcely touch historic ground. Its history is yet 
to be written, yet to be acted. But I come to this 
land, which, though small, is as full of memories as 
the heaven is of stars, and almost as bright. There 
is not the most insignificant piece of water that does 
not make my heart thrill with some story of heroism, 
or some remembered poem; for not only has Scot- 
land had the good fortune to have had men who knew 
how to make history, but she has reared those bards 
who have known how to sing her fame. And every 
steep and every valley, and almost every single 
league on which my feet have trod have made me feel 



3lO HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

as if I was walking in a dream. I never expected to 
feel my eyes overflow with tears of gladness that I 
have been permitted in the prime of life to look upon 
dear old Scotland. For your historians have taught us 
history,your poets have been the charm of our firesides, 
your theologians have enriched our libraries; from 
your philosophers — Reid, Brown, and Stewart — we 
have derived the elements of our philosophy, and 
your scientific researches have greatly stimulated the 
study of science in our land. I come to Scotland 
almost as a pilgrim would to Jerusalem, and to see those 
scenes whose story had stirred my imagination from 
my earliest youth: and lean pay no higher compliment 
than to say that, having seen some part of Scotland, 
I am satisfied; and permit me to say that if, when 
you know me, you are a thousandth part as satisfied 
with me as I am with you, we shall get along very 
well together." Four times this exordium was inter- 
rupted with applause, and Mr. Beecher could not 
have more wisely begun his address than by pouring 
out his grateful heart in these noble words. 

Glasgow was the headquarters of the shipping 
interests concerned in the blockade. Mr. Beecher 
discussed the relations of slavery to the working 
classes everywhere and applied his arguments to the 
men before him who were helping to degrade the 
cause of labor by cooperating with the South. 

He has himself reported that the interruptions in 
Glasgow were very bad, but not at all like those in 
Manchester. " After they were once stilled you 
would have thought that we were in a revival." He 
demonstrated that the cause of labor was one in all 
lands, and he showed how slavery brought labor into 



THE HEART OF BRUCE RETURNS TO SCOTLAND. 3II 

contempt, and that it was a shame for the men of 
Glasgow to be building ships to antagonize free 
labor in America. " They were driving nails in 
their own coffins." The questions put to him here 
were very shrewd, and his replies involved the neces- 
sity of explaining how the North was hampered, by 
its obligations under the Constitution and by the 
reserved rights of the States, from interfering with 
slavery sheltered by law. 

Regarding the misrepresentations scattered broad- 
cast about himself, he said, that, had they been 
wanting, so accustomed had he been to misrepresen- 
tation in his own land, he would have felt that some- 
thing was lacking in the English atmosphere! After 
pronouncing that ninty-nine out of every hundred of 
those things charged against him were wholly false- 
hoods he said: "If I never spared my own country, 
if I never spared the American Church, nor the Gov- 
ernment, nor my own party, nor my personal friends, 
did you expect that I would treat you better than I 
did those of my own country?"^ 

The destiny of America was to establish regulated 
Christian liberty for the American Continent, and 
interference from France or Great Britain would not 
be permitted. After showing how slavery became 
profitable, and was made more profitable in certain 
parts of the South by the breeding of slaves for the 
market, and that the domestic slave-trade carried on 
between Virginia and the Gulf States was unspeak- 
ably worse than the African slave-trade, after show- 
ing that a system of slavery requires intellectual and 



*" Palrioiic Addresses," p. 467. 



312 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

moral ignorance in the slave and that his degrada- 
tion passes over to his work, and disastrously affects 
all labor, even that performed by free white men, 
and that while the North was a vast hive of universal 
industry in which idleness had become as disrepu- 
table as labor was in the South — he claimed the right 
of demanding from the workmen of Glasgow that they 
should give their hearty sympathies to those who 
were seeking to make work honorable everywhere. 

" For a grand and final contest between the sin and 
guilt of labor-oppression and the peace and glory of 
free labor, He set apart the Western Continent. 
That the trial might be above all suspicion, to the 
right. He gave the meager soil, the austere climate, 
short summers, long and rigorous winters; to the 
wrong he gave fair skies, abundant soils, valleys of 
the tropics teeming with almost spontaneous abun- 
dance. The Christian doctrine of work has made 
New England a garden, while Virginia is a wilder- 
ness. The free North is abundantly rich; the South 
bankrupt! Every element of prosperous society 
abounds in the North and is lacking in the South. 
There is more real wealth in the simple little State 
of Massachusetts than in any ten Southern States." 

'' Oppression is as accursed in the field as it is upon 
the throne. It is as odious before God under the 
slave-driver's hat as under the prince's crown or 
priest's mitre." ^ 

He declared that the South meant to reopen the 
African slave-trade for the purpose of cheapening 
negroes, and that hence every freeman in Great Brit- 



* '* Patnolic Addresses," p. 473-474. 



THE HEART OF BRUCE RETURNS TO SCOTLAND. 313 

ain who favored the South really cast in his influence 
for the opening of that trade. When hisses as well 
as cheers followed this utterance, he said: "When 
you put a drunken engineer to drive a train, you may 
not mean to come to any harm, but when you are in 
that train you cannot help yourselves. It is just the 
same here — you do not mean the slave-trade, but they 
doj and all they ask of you is, ' Be blind.' " 

Perhaps no part of his speech in England was more 
effective than his reply to the question, " Why did the 
North not permit tlie South to go since their econo- 
mies were so diametrically opposed." " When I am 
asked, * Why not let the South go?' I return for an 
answer a question, ' Be pleased to tell me what part 
of the British Islands you are willing to let go from 
under the Crown, when its inhabitants secede and 
set up for independence ? ' 

*' Secession was an appeal from the ballot to the 
bullet. It was not a noble minority defying usurpa- 
tion or despotism in the assertion of fundamental 
rights. It was a despotism which, when put to shame 
by the will of a free people, expressed through the 
ballot-box, rushed into rebellion as a means of per- 
petuating slavery." 

The hisses were plentifully sprinkled through parts 
of this Glasgow address, and Mr. Beecher and a good 
many of his auditors got into a perfect tangle of 
fierce affirmations and denials as to whether the 
South would ever come back into the Union. 

To the impudent assertion that the North was not 
sincere in this conflict, Mr. Beecher replied in a burst 
of noble eloquence, in words which every Northern pa- 
triot who remembers those days of sacrifice and awful 



314 HENRY WARD EEECHER. 

agony might be proud to wear as a frontlet between 
his eyes. " They have come not like the Goths and 
Huns from a wandering life or inclement skies to 
seek fairer skies and richer soil, but from homes of 
luxury, from cultivated farms, from busy workshops, 
from literary labors, from the bar, the pulpit and the 
exchange, thronging around the old National flag that 
has symbolized liberty to mankind, all moved by a pro- 
found love of country, and firmly, fiercely determined 
that the Motherland shall not be divided, especially 
not in order that slavery may scoop out for itself a 
den of refuge from Northern civilization and an em- 
pire to domineer over all the American tropics. It is 
this sublime patriotism which, on every side, I hear 
stigmatized as a mad rush of National ambition! Has, 
then, the love of country run so low in Great Britain 
that the rising of a Nation to defend its territory, its 
Government, its flag, and all the institutions over 
which that flag has waved, is a theme for cold aver- 
sion in the pulpit and sneers in the pew ? Is gener- 
osity dead in England that she will not admire in 
her children the very qualities which have made her 
children proud of the memories of their common 
English ancestors ?" ^ 

To Earl Russell's argument, in replying to Mr. 
Sumner, that America was the child of two rebellions 
— the Puritan and Revolutionary — Mr. Beecher said: 
" Were they rebellions against liberty to more des- 
potism, or against oppression to more freedom ? 
The English rebellion and the American rebellion 
were both toward greater freedom for all classes of 



' " Patriotic Addresses," p. 488. 



THE HEART OF BRUCE RETURNS TO SCOTLAND. 315 

men. This rebellion is for the sake of holding four 
million slaves to greater security and less annoyance 
from free institutions." 

He brought things home with a resounding crash 
to the industries of Glasgow by affirming, amid 
applause and hisses, that every man who struck a 
blow on the iron that is put into those ships for the 
South is striking a blow and forging a manacle for 
the hand of the slave. " Every free laborer in old 
Glasgow who is laboring to rear up iron ships for 
the South is laboring to establish on sea and on land 
the doctrine that capital has a right to own labor." 

The preacher whose whole life was a part of his 
religion; who made every English platform on which 
he spoke for America a pulpit for the principles of that 
Gospel which he loved, presented a Day-of-Judgment 
view of the question before the God-fearing men of 
Glasgow when he exclaimed : " O, I would rather, than 
all the crowns and thrones of earth, have the sweet 
assuring smile of Jesus when he says: ' Come, wel- 
come, inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these, 
ye did it unto Me.' And I would rather face the 
thunderbolt than stand before Him when he says on 
that terrible day, 'Inasmuch as ye did it not unto 
the least of these My little ones, ye did it not unto 
Me.' You strike God in the face when you work for 
slave-holders. Your money so got and quickly earned 
will be badly kept, and you will be poor before you 
can raise your children, and dying you will leave a 
memory that will rise against you on the Day of 
Judgment. By the solemnity of that Judgment, by 
the sanctity of conscience, by the love that you bear 
to humanity, by your old hereditary love of liberty — 



31 6 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

in the name of God and of mankind — I charge you to 
come out from among them, to have nothing to do 
with the unclean and filthy lucre made by pandering 
to slavery." * 

Towards the close of this tremendous speech he 
showed how unnatural it was for America to seek 
alliance with Russia rather than with England. 
Monstrous beyond words to depict would be a war 
between these two leaders of the English-speaking 
nations. It was a duty on both sides to avoid every 
occasion for offense, and since America was in 
anguish, staggering under the blows of a great 
rebellion, it was especially incumbent on Great 
Britain to be forbearing. 

He said, and there is scarcely anything in modern 
eloquence more impressive, " Remember — remem- 
ber — remember — we are carrying out our dead. Our 
sons, our brother's sons, our sister's children are in 
this great war of -liberty and of principle." It was 
brutal for a landlord to send out a warrant to distress 
a widowed mother as she was walking to the grave 
of her first-born son, "Yet it was in the hour of our 
mortal anguish that, wiien by an unauthorized act, 
one of the captains of our navy seized a British 
ship, for which our Government instantly offered all 
reparation, a British army was hurried to Canada. 
I do not undertake to teach the law that governs the 
question; but this I do undertake to say, and I will 
carry every generous man in this audience with me, 
when I affirm that if between America, bent double 
with the anguish of this bloody war, and. Great 



* " Patrioiic Addresses," p. 492, 



THE HEART OF BRUCE RETURNS TO SCOTLAND. 317 

Britain, who sits at peace, there is to be forbearance 
on either side, it should be on your side." 

Amid great and prolonged cheering, a resolution of 
thanks for his admirable and eloquent address was 
passed by the meeting. 

The next evening, October 14th, Mr. Beecher spoke 
in Edinburgh. With great difficulty he reached the 
platform. The people were so tightly wedged in that 
it was necessary that he should be hoisted over their 
heads and passed on by friendly hands up to the 
gallery, and down over the front of the gallery to the 
platform. Except at the beginning of the meeting 
the disturbances were comparatively slight, and the 
resolution protesting against slavery and encouraging 
the cause of Emancipation in America which was 
introduced, after what Dr. Alexander called Mr. 
Beecher's magnificent oration, was carried amid great 
cheering. At the start he was hissed as well as 
applauded. Deprecating somewhat the earnest plead- 
ings of the Chairman that he be given a hearing, he 
stated that he had never thought it necessary to ask 
an audience in the East or in the West to listen to 
him, " Not even in America, the countr}'-, as we have 
lately been informed, of mobs." 

In the midst of his recital of the history of the dis- 
pute between the North and the South, wherein he 
showed how the Southern States, finally wedded to 
slavery, had for fifty years taken possession of the 
Government, he turned his remarks so as to introduce 
a suspicious compliment to Great Britain. " All 
the filibustering and all the intimidations of Foreign 
Powers, all the so-called snubbing of Eastern Powers, 
happened during the period when the policy of the 



3l8 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

country was controlled by the South. May I be per- 
mitted to look on it as a mark of victorious Chris- 
tianity that England now loves her worst enemy, and 
is sitting with arms of sympathy around her neck? " 
But the compliment was followed by loud cheers. 

With regard to Southern independence for which, as 
he agreed with Earl Russell in saying, the South was 
contending, he remarked: "What, then, is Southern 
independence? It is the meteor around the dark 
body of slavery. King Bomba of Naples wanted to 
be independent, and his idea of independence was 
that he should be let alone whilst he was oppressing 
his subjects. This very idea of independence has 
been the same since the days when Nimrod hunted 
men: this is the only independence the South is fight- 
ing for." ^ 

Toward the close of his speecn he made a remark 
concerning Abraham Lincoln's policy and character 
which deserves to be remembered. Speaking of the 
Emancipation Proclamation he said: "The President 
was very loath to take the steps he did; but, though 
slow, Abraham Lincoln was sure. A thousand men 
could not make him plant his foot before he was 
ready, ten thousand could not move it after he had 
put it down." 

Mr. Beecher's estimate of the importance of the 
struggle in which the North was engaged may be seen 
from a letter which he wrote to his sister, Mrs. Stowe. 
"This contest is nothing more or less then a conflict 
between democratic and aristocratic institutions, in 
which success to one must be defeat to the other. 



" Patriotic Addresses," p. 511. 



THE HEART OF BRUCE RETURNS TO SCOTLAND. 319 

The aristocratic party in England see this plainly- 
enough and I do not propose to endeavor to pull the 
wool over their eyes. I do not expect sympathy from 
them. No order yet ever had any sympathy with 
what must prove their own downfall. We have got 
to settle this question by our armies and the opinions 
of mankind will follow." ^ Therefore it was that Mr. 
Beecher's whole heart and strength went into this 
great contest which he was waging with public opin- 
ion in Great Britain. All that strength was soon to 
bear a supreme test and " the sinews of a Titan's 
heart " were to be strained to the uttermost. 



* " Men of Our Times," p. 557. 



CHAPTER XXXI. 

"l HAVE FOUGHT WITH BEASTS AT EPHESUS." 

Perhaps the climax of Mr. Beecher's contest was 
his address at Liverpool on the i6th of October. 
Public excitement was intense, immense efforts were 
put forth to break down the speaker. Blood-red 
placards, intended to prejudice the people, lined the 
Liverpool streets. The Philharmonic Hall was 
thronged in every part. 

When his name was spoken by the Chairman it was 
hissed, and when he stepped forward to speak he was 
received with groans as well as cheers. For some 
time he could not get beyond, *' Ladies and Gentle- 
men." The Chairman threatened to call the police. 
In his second sentence Mr. Beecher brought in a de- 
nunciation of African slavery with elicited cheers. 
" For some time it was doubtful whether the cele- 
brated Abolitionist would be allowed to speak: but 
those who sat near the reverend gentleman, and ob- 
served his firmly compressed lips and imperturbable 
demeanor saw at once that it would require some- 
thing more than noise and spasmodic hisses to cause 
Mr. Beecher to lose heart." 

This report from one of the Liverpool papers will 
indicate how Mr. Beecher impressed the intelligent 
English spectator. Perhaps a single half page from 
this Liverpool speech will give a better impression of 
the tumultuous scene than any description. 



"l HAVE FOUGHT WITH BEASTS AT EPHESUS. 32I 

" And when in Manchester I saw these huge placards 
*Who is Henry Ward Beecher?' [laughter, cries of 
" Quite right," and applause] and when in Liverpool 
I was told that there were those blood-red placards, 
purporting to say what Henry Ward Beecher had 
said, and calling upon Englishmen to suppress free 
speech, I tell you what I thought: I thought simply 
this, I am glad of it. [Laughter.] Why ? Because if 
they had felt perfectly secure that you are the minions 
of the South and the slaves of slavery, they would 
have been perfectly still [applause and uproar]. And, 
therefore, when I saw so much nervous apprehension 
that if I were permitted to speak [hisses and applause], 
— when I found that they were afraid to have me speak 
[hisses and laughter, and " No," '' No"], when I found 
that they considered my speaking damaging to their 
cause [applause], when I found that they appealed 
from facts and reasonings to mob law [applause and 
uproar] I said: No man need tell me what the heart 
and secret counsel of these men are. They tremble 
and are afraid." ^ [Applause, laughter, hisses, and 
" No," " No," and a voice " New York mob."] 

It was fortunate for Mr. Beecher, who had to hurl 
his brief sentences between the short pauses of such 
a thunder-storm, that, as Dr. Holmes has said, " His 
ordinary speaking is pointed, staccatoed, as is that of 
most successful extemporaneous speakers; he is short- 
gaited; the movement of his thoughts is that of a 
chopping sea, rather than the long, rolling, rhythmical 
wave-procession of phrase-balancing rhetoricans." 

Mr. Beecher's appeal to the manly tone and temper 



* " Patriotic Addresses," p. 517. 
21 



322 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

of Englishmen, to their love of fair play, produced a 
temporary good effect. He invited his friends to sit 
still and keep still. '^ I and my friends, the Secessionists, 
will make all the noise." And thus on that stormy 
night he urged the need of liberty, if labor, manufac- 
tures, and commerce were to be prosperous. He gave 
more than an inkling of his incipient free-trade 
theories, by speaking against a burdensome tariff: he 
showed the need of prosperity and education among 
the populations to which Liverpool sold her goods. 
He proved that " that nation is the best customer 
that is freest, because freedom works prosperity, 
industry, and wealth," and that, aside from moral 
considerations. Great Britain had a large, direct 
pecuniary and commercial interest in the liberty, 
civilization, and wealth of every people and every 
nation of the globe. 

" To evangelize has more than a moral and relig- 
ious import — it comes back to temporal relations. 
Wherever a nation that is crushed, cramped, de- 
graded under despotism is struggling to be free, you, 
Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Paisley, all have an 
interest that that nation should be free." ^ 

England's great thought was consumers. There 
are no more continents to be discovered. Great 
Britain's policy should be to improve the old markets, 
civilizing the world in order to get a better class of 
purchasers. 

" If you were to press Italy down again under the 
feet of despotism, Italy, discouraged, could draw but 
very few supplies from you. But give her liberty, 



1 (• 



Palrrotic Addresses," p. 521. 



I HAVE FOUGHT WITH BEASTS AT EPHESUS. 323 

kindle schools throughout her valleys, spur her indus- 
try, make treaties with her by which she can exchange 
her wine, her oil, and her silk for your manufactured 
goods; and for every effort you make in that direc- 
tion there will come back profit to you by increased 
traffic with her," ^ [Loud applause.] 

Following the words, *' If the South should be 
rendered independent," there came a perfect war of 
cheering and hisses; half the audience rose to their 
feet, shouting and making a perfect bedlam. Mr. 
Beecher remained quiet and silent until peace was 
restored, and then said: "Well, you have had your 
turn, now let me have mine again. [Loud applause 
and laughter.] It is a little inconvenient to talk 
against the wind, but, after all, if you will just keep 
good natured, I am not going to lose my temper; will 
you watch yours ? Besides all that, it rests me, and 
gives me a chance, you know, to get my breath. 
[Applause and hisses.] And I think that the bark of 
those men is worse than their bite. They do not 
mean any harm; they do not know any better."* 
[Loud laughter, applause, and continued uproar.] 

Words sometimes have been called half battles. 
Mr. Beecher spoke at Liverpool wit all the incidents 
of a battlefield, with charges and counter-charges, 
incessant shouting, and constant interruptions on the 
one side, while the orator's business was to fire his 
pistol-shots of sentences in every lull. Occasionally 
there would be a rifle-shot projected with all his vocal 
power, and once in a while there came a cannon-shot 
with a long reverberating roar. 



^ " Patriotic Addresses," p. 523. - ' Patriotic Addresses," p. 5240 



324 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

There is probably no more entertaining passage at 
arms on the field of debate than Mr. Beecher's fight with 
the Liverpool mob. It was give and take, parry and 
thrust, shot and counter-shot, from first to last. Said 
a Liverpool paper: " The interruptions were incess- 
ant, while a scene prevailed the equal of which has 
seldom been witnessed in Liverpool. " Three cheers 
for Jeff Davis," was a proposal which once more met 
with a hearty response from a portion of the audience; 
and, as the admirers of the Confederate President 
were loath to cease their approval, Mr. Beecher com- 
posedly sat down on the low parapet of the platform 
and waited a calm, at the same time apologizing to 
the reporters for causing them to be so long detained. 
At one time, about a score of persons were speaking 
in various parts of the hall, and Mr. Beecher, as a 
last resource, stated that if the meeting would not 
hear him, he would address the reporters." * 

After he had shown what poor customers the slaves 
and degraded whites of the South then were, and 
must remain, and how little Liverpool could sell such 
a population, a population that required none of her 
carpets and linens and machines and looking-glasses 
and pictures and engravings, a voice cried out, *' We 
will sell them ships "; and then the reply came, " You 
may sell ships to a few, but what ships can you sell 
to two-thirds of the population of poor whites and 
blacks ? [Applause.] A little bagging, a little linsey 
woolsey, a few whips and manacles, are all that you 
can sell for the slave. [Great applause and uproar.] 
This very day in the slave States of America there 



^ "Biography," p. 425. 



"l HAVE FOUGHT WITH BEASTS AT EPHESUS."' 325 

are eight millions out of twelve millions that are not, 
and cannot, be your customers from the very laws of 
trade." i 

To one insulting interruption, when a voice cried 
out, " Go on with your subject; we know about Eng- 
land," he replied: "Excuse me, sir, I am the speaker, 
not you, and it is for me to determine what to say." 
[Hear, Hear.] Do you suppose that I am going to 
speak about America except to convince Englishmen ? 
I am here to talk to you for the sake of ultimately 
carrying you with me in judgment and in thinking. 
[Oh! Oh!] However, as to this logic of cat-calls, 
it is slavery logic; I am used to it." ^ [Applause and 
cheers.] 

In writing to the Atla7itic Monthly^ in January, 1864, 
on Mr. Beecher's embassy to England, Dr. Holmes 
described the Chokers, Hustlers, Burglars, with their 
jimmies in their pockets, fighting robbers with brass 
knuckles, " the whole set in a vast thief-constituency, 
thick as rats in sewers," as " the disputants whom 
the emissaries of the slave-power called upon to 
refute the arguments of the Brooklyn clergyman." 

As Mr. Beecher finished his remarks on the com- 
mercial and manufacturing advantages accruing to 
Great Britain through emancipation in America, he 
cried out: " It is said that the South is fighting for 
just that independence of which I have been speak- 
ing. [Hear, Hear.] But the South is divided on 
that subject. [No, No.] There are twelve millions 
in the South, Four millions of them are asking for 



* " Patriotic Addresses," pp. 526-527. 
^" Patriotic Addresses," p. 527. 



326 HENRY WARD BEECHER 

their liberty. [No, No, hisses, Yes, applause and in- 
terruptions.] Four millions of them are asking for 
their liberty. [Continued interruptions and renewed 
applause.] Eight millions are banded together to 
prevent it. [No, No, hisses, and applause.] That is 
what they ask the world to recognize as a strike for 
independence. [Hear, Hear, and laughter.] Eight 
million white men fighting to prevent the liberty of 
four million black men, challenging the world. [Up- 
roar, hisses, applause, and continued interruptions.] 
You cannot get over the fact; there it is, like iron, 
you cannot stir it. [Uproar.] They went out of the 
Union because slave-property was not recognized in 
it." ' 

To the remark that England could not help sym- 
pathizing with the gallant people who were the 
weaker party in the American struggle, he said: 
" Nothing could be more generous, when a weak 
party stands for its own legitimate rights against im- 
perious pride and power than to sympathize with the 
weak; but who ever yet sympathized with a weak 
thief because three constables had got hold of him ? 
. . . I could wish so much bravery had had a bet- 
ter cause, and that so much self-denial had been less de- 
luded; that that poisonous and venomous doctrine of 
State sovereignty might have been kept aloof; that 
so many gallant spirits, such as Stonewall Jackson, 
might still have lived. [Great applause and loud 
cheers, again and again renewed.] The force of 
these facts, historical and incontrovertible, cannot be 
broken except through diverting attention by an at- 



Palrioiic Addresses," pp. 529, 530. 



" I HAVE FOUGHT WITH BEASTS AT EPHESUS." 327 

tack on the North. It is stated that the North is 
fighting for the Union, and not for Emancipation. 
The North is fighting for Union, for that insures 
Emancipation." ' 

And so the fight went on. The opposition did not 
wear out, the uproar, interruptions, and hubbub, were 
indescribable. It was often but a short sentence at a 
time that he could interject into the melee. Again 
and again the Chairman came to his help. At one 
time an individual was lifted up and carried from the 
room amid cheering and hisses. When the mob 
endeavored to prevent his reading something Mr. 
Lincoln had said, he cried out: " Well, you can hear 
it or not; it will be printed whether you hear it or 
hear it not." Then came loud cries of " Read, read." 

When, after more than two hours of desperate 
fighting Mr. Beecher resumed his seat, it was the 
signal for an outburst of every conceivable expression 
of approval and disapproval. The vote of thanks, 
however, was carried with loud and long cheering, 
the Chairman declaring that he expected that the 
vote would be joined in by all the representatives of 
American slave-holders present, from the fact that 
they had had more instruction that night than they 
had apparently received during all the previous part 
of their lives. 

Unquestionably this was one of the greatest orator- 
ical achievements on record. The Rev. Dr. A. H. 
Bradford, recalls a remark made by the famous 
ex-pastor of the Broadway Tabernacle, of New York 
City, the Rev. Dr. Wm. M. Taylor, who, after describ- 



^" Patriotic Addresses," pp. 532, 533. 



328 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

ing Mr. Beecher's speeches in England during the 
war, and of this great tussle which he had with the 
mob, said, with his peculiar emphasis, " I tell you I 
believe there has not been such eloquence in the world 
since Demosthenes." ^ 

Liverpool was doubtless the strategic point in Mr. 
Beecher's English campaign. His enemies felt this, 
and his life was seriously threatened, not only before 
his entrance into the hall, but afterwards. He reports 
that there were men in the galleries and boxes who 
came armed, and that some of the bold men, who 
were friends of the North, went up in to those boxes, 
and drawing their bowie-knives and pistols, said to 
these young bloods: "The first man that fires here 
will rue it." He reports that nearly all the members 
of the Congregational Association of England and 
Wales were present on the platform at this memora- 
ble meeting, and doubtless Mr. Beecher's fame as an 
orator was enhanced by the reports of these clerical 
auditors. 

It«had taken him an hour and a half to get partial 
control of the meeting, and nearly three hours' use of 
his voice, at its utmost strength, to get through with 
his speech. " I sometimes felt like a shipmaster at- 
tempting to preach on board of a ship, through 
a speaking trumpet, with a tornado on the sea, and 
mutiny among the men. '"* 

The Rev. Dr. Campbell, who had heard some of the 
best speeches of Daniel O'Connell, believed that none 
of them was equal to Mr. Beecher's effort at the 
memorable Liverpool meeting. Doubtless his effec- 



Life," p. 352. 2 - Life," p. 177. 



"l HAVE FOUGHT WITH BEASTS AT EPHESUS. 329 

tiveness came in part from the hostility of so large 
a portion of his audience. Dr. Holmes thought that 
since Mr. Beecher's quick spirit needed to be roused 
by a few sharp questions, "he could almost afford to 
carry with him his picadores to sting him with sar- 
casms." 

Dr. R. S. Storrs has said : " When Mr. Beecher was 
in England they made volcanoes around him on no 
small scale at Liverpool, at Manchester, and other 
places. But that fluent thought within, and that fluent 
eloquence of the lips, put out the volcanoes; or if they 
did not put them out, they made the fire shoot the 
other way, till the ground became too hot for the 
English Government to stand on if it would permit 
its evident sympathy for the Southern Confederacy 
to be formulated into law." ^ 



1 X 



Plymouth Church Silver Wedding," p. 81, 



CHAPTER XXXII. 

THE AMERICAN DEMOSTHENES TRIUMPHS. 

If the climax of Mr. Beecher's struggle in England 
was reached on the i6th of October in the Philhar- 
monic Hall in Liverpool, the climax of his triumph 
occurred in Exeter Hall, London, on the 20th of 
October, where, under the auspices of the Emanci- 
pation Society and London Committee of Corre- 
spondence on American Affairs, he addressed a meet- 
ing which densely packed that famous Hall, and 
where he was welcomed with long and reiterated 
cheers. 

Mr. Benjamin Scott, the Chamberlain of the City of 
London, was the Chairman of this great meeting, and 
when in 1886 Mr. Beecher spoke in Exeter Hall again, 
Mr. Scott, who was still Chamberlain of the city, was 
asked by Mr. Beecher to occupy once more the same 
position. In his address, in 1863, he said of Mr. 
Beecher: "I honor and respect him for his manliness; 
he is every inch a man; he is a standard by which 
humanity may well measure itself." 

Mr. Beecher b}'' this time was famous. His four 
speeches, which had been reported in all the leading 
journals of the United Kingdom, had made him the 
talk of the clubs. As one indication, perhaps charac- 
teristically English, of his added fame, he mentions 



., THE AMERICAN DEMOSTHENES TRIUMPHS. 33 1 

the fact that when he first went to London and 
stopped at a certain inn, he was put into a little bed- 
room right under the rafters; Avhen he returned from 
the Continent he had been somewhat talked about 
and they put him in a third story front-room, but on 
his third visit he was received by the landlord and 
servants in white aprons, and was bowed in and put 
in the second story with " a front parlor and bedroom 
and everything beautiful." 

The tremendous strain which had been put upon 
his voice, especially at Liverpool, had been such that 
when he went to bed the night before his London 
address he was too hoarse to be heard aloud. He 
said resignedly: " Lord, Thou knowest this, let it be 
as Thou wilt." At the farewell breakfast given to him 
in London, three days later, he describes this painful 
experience. " I felt all day on Monday that I was 
come to London to speak to a public audience, but 
my voice was gone; and I felt as though about to 
be made a derision to my enemies. ... I asked 
God to restore me my voice as a child would ask its 
father to grant it a favor. But I hoped that God would 
grant me His grace to enable me, if it were necessary 
for the cause that I should be put to open shame, 
to stand up as a fool before the audience. When I 
got up on Tuesday morning, I spoke to myself to try 
whether I could speak, and my voice was quite clear." 

As in Edinburgh, Mr. Beecher had great difficulty 
in entering the hall. He was detained in the crowd 
on the street for some time, but at last was borne 
within on the shoulders of policemen. " When I got 
around to the back door, I felt a woman throw her 
arms around me — I saw that they were the arms of a 



332 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

woman, and that she had me in her arms — and when 
I went through the door, she got through, too, and on 
turning around, I found that it was one of the mem- 
bers of my church. She had married and gone to 
London, and she was determined to hear that speech, 
and so took this way to accomplish an apparently 
impossible task. She grasped and held me until I 
got her in. I suppose that is the way a great many 
sinners will get into Heaven finally." * 

He began his great London address, which Mr. 
Justin McCarthy, himself an admirable judge of 
oratory, has said proved Mr. Beecher to be " the 
most dexterous and powerful platform speaker " he 
had ever heard, by disclaiming a large part of the 
praise bestowed upon him so lavishly by the Cham- 
berlain of the city. He had not been one of the 
pioneers of the anti-slavery movement in America, 
That honor belonged to m.en like Garrison, Phillips, 
the Tappans, Josiah Leavitt, Gerritt Smith, and 
others. He said: 'M cannot permit, in this fair 
country, the honors to be put upon me and wrested 
from those men who deserve them far more than I do. 
All I can say is this, that when I began my public life, I 
fell into the ranks under appropriate captains, and 
fought as well as I knew how, in the ranks or in 
command." 

After reviewing the line of his argument at Man- 
chester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Liverpool, and 
after summing up his efforts by saying that he 
had endeavored ''to enlist against this flagitious 
wickedness, and the great civil war which it has 

» "Life," p. 179. 



THE AMERICAN DEMOSTHENES TRIUMPHS. 333 

kindled, the judgment, conscience, and interests of 
the British people," he added: " I have tried to show 
that sympathy for the South, however covered by 
excuses or softened by sophistry, is simply sympa- 
thy with an audacious attempt to build up a slave 
empire^ pure and simple." 

Having spoken to the English from an English 
point of view, he would ask them to look at this 
struggle from an American point of view, and to con- 
sider its moral aspects. The opposition which had 
been exasperated by his great victory in other cities, 
for his strokes had " invariably drawn blood from the 
hides of the Confederate sympathizers," had organ- 
ized an effort to defeat the purposes of the London 
meeting. Lord Russell had recently declared that 
the moral sympathies of the English people were 
adverse to the South, and immense efforts were made 
in London to disprove this assertion. But the shil- 
ling admission-fee to Exeter Hall had eliminated 
many of the Southern sympathizers, although parts 
of the building were occupied by men who meant 
mischief. 

Early in the meeting a hiss was started, but the 
hostile demonstration was not prolonged. Referring 
to the weakness of his voice, Mr. Beecher said: "I 
expect to be hoarse, and I am willing to be hoarse, if 
I can in any way assist to bring the mother and 
daughter heart to heart and hand to hand together." 
Later, the Southern sympathizers tried by their hisses 
and tumult to drown the cheers, but Mr. Beecher 
quietly and smilingly said: " Friends, I thank you 
for these interruptions; it gives me a chance to rest." 
This put an end to the hisses for the evening. 



334 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

An eye-witness of the memorable scene says: " One 
of the editors of the Star^ himself a distinguished 
speaker, and thoroughly acquainted with English 
audiences, who sat near to me, whispered in my ear: 
* There are a great many here who do not cheer; 
there is a strong chance of a row yet, and the meeting 
is in just such a condition that the result will depend 
on the power and equanimity of the speaker.' Then 
I replied: ' You need not fear.* If Mr. Beecher had 
heard our brief whispers, he could not have more 
distinctly applied the remark of the editor. At that 
moment, although he had been interesting all along, 
he suddenly stepped one side from the desk upon 
which his notes lay, and his face gleamed like a 
sword leaping from a scabbard; no more hisses, no 
more cheers now for half an hour; the audience is 
magnetized — breathless."^ ' 

Mr. Beecher has reported that he had less trouble 
in London than anywhere else, and that, the battle 
having been already fought, he was able to give his 
London speech a more religious tone than had been 
previously possible in England. 

In corroboration of his claim that the South had 
been protected in her rights by the North, and that 
the Government had not been oppressive to Southern 
interests, he quoted very effectively from the famous 
speech of Vice-President Stephens, who said that the 
South had had a majority of the Presidents and of 
the Judges of the Supreme Court. With much 
lucidity he explained how the National Government 
had been unable to interfere directly with slavery in 



1 " Biography," p. 435. 



THE AMERICAN DEMOSTHENES TRIUMPHS. 335 

the States, but, since slavery had lifted itself up out 
of its State humility, to strike the Nation's life, it 
became a National enemy and was no longer exempt 
from Governmental attack. Perhaps the destructive 
character of the doctrine of secession was never more 
vividly shown than in his description of it as " a huge 
revolving millstone that grinds the National life to 
powder; it is anarchy in velvet and National destruc- 
tion clothed in soft phrases and periphrastic expres- 
sions. But we have fought with that devil, Slavery, 
and understand him better than you do. No people 
with patriotism and honor will give up territory 
without a struggle for it." ^ 

Substituting the County of Kent for the State of 
South Carolina, and asking how English gentlemen 
would feel if the County of Kent should try the experi- 
ment which South Carolina was making, he injected 
into the English mind a clear conception of tlie Ameri- 
can cause. Again, he said, that " the Mississippi, which 
is our Southern door and hall to come in and go out, 
runs right through the territory which they have tried 
to rend from us. The South magnanimously offered 
to let us use it ; but what would you say if, on going 
home, you found a squad of gypsies seated in your 
hall, who refused to be ejected, saying: * But look 
here, we will let you go in and out on equitable and 
easy terms.' " ^ 

Referring to the cry heard all over England, " Let 
slaver)'^ go," he told most effectively the story of how 
Sir Fowell Buxton seized a mad dog by the neck and 
collar and held him until' help could begot. "If 



^ " Patriotic Addresses," p. 561. ^ " Patriotic Addresses," p. 562. 



33^ HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

there had been Englishmen there of the stripe of 
The Times ^ they would have said to Fowell Buxton, 
* Let him go ' ; but is there one here who does not 
feel the moral nobleness of that man, who, rather 
than let the mad animal go down the street biting 
children, and women, and men, risked his life and 
prevented the dog from doing evil ? Shall we allow 
this hell-hound of slavery, mad, mad as it is, to go 
biting millions in the future ? We will peril life and 
limb and all we have first. These truths are not 
exaggerated — they are diminished rather than mag- 
nified in my statement ; and you cannot tell how 
powerfully they are influencing us unless you were 
standing in our midst in America ; you cannot under- 
stand how firm that National feeling is which God 
has bred in the North on this subject. It is deeper 
than the sea, it is firmer than the hills, it is as serene 
as the sky over our heads where God dwells." ' 

After nobly expressing the American belief that by 
this awful and yet glorious struggle, the North was 
helping the cause of the common people the world 
over, and that if the North failed to conquer this 
odious oligarchy of slavery, the cause of popular 
rights would suffer in every land, Mr. Beecherrose to 
one of those grander oratorio heights for which this 
London speech is distinguished. " Standing by my 
cradle, standing by my hearth, standing by the altar 
of the church, standing by all the places that mark 
the name and memory of heroic men who poured out 
their blood and lives for principle, I declare that in 
ten or twenty years of war, we will sacrifice every- 



* " Patriotic Addresses," p. 565. 



THE AMERICAN DEMOSTHENES TRIUMPHS. 337 

thing we have for principle. If the love of popular 
liberty is dead in Great Britain, you will not under- 
stand us ; but if the love of liberty lives as it once lived, 
and has worthy successors of those renowned men 
that were our ancestors as well as yours, and whose 
examples and principles we inherit as so much 
seed-corn in a new and fertile land, then you will 
understand our firm, invincible determination — to 
fight this war through^ at all hazards, and at every 
cost." ' 

And in rebuking that hypocritical British horror of 
the American war, he cried out: "On what shore has 
not the prow of your ships dashed ? What land is 
there with a name and people where your banner has 
not led your soldiers ? And when the great resur- 
rection reveille shall sound, it will muster British 
soldiers from every clime and people under the 
whole heaven. Ah! but it is said that this is a war 
against your own blood. How long is it since you 
poured soldiers into Canada and let all your yards 
work night and day to avenge the taking of two men 
out of the Trent V" 

Referring to the declaration of the London Twies 
that the American people were sore because they had 
not the moral sympathy of Great Britain, he remarked 
that " those who are represented in the newspapers 
as favorable to the South are like men who have 
arrows and bows strong enough to send the shafts 
three thousand miles; and those who feel sympathy 
for the North are like men who have shafts but have 
no bows that could shoot them far enough." He 



* ' • Patriotic Addresses," p. 566. * * * Patriotic Addresses," p. 568. 
22 



338 HENRY WARD DEECIIER. 

believed that he would have a different story to tell 
when he returned home. 

Loud and enthusiastic cheering followed this 
declaration, and then, very fortunately, a voice cried 
out: "What about the Russians?" Mr. Beecher 
explained in a sportive and confidential way that 
New York, in treating the Russians so warmly, was 
only flirting with Russia, while all the time her eye 
was on England. He agreed with his audience that 
American sympathy with the oppressor of Poland 
was out of place. " Certainly it is," he cried, and 
when the shouts had entirely subsided, and a little 
time had been allowed for friend and foe to specu- 
late as to his reply, he leaned forward and putting 
on an extremely simple expression, he said in a mild 
voice: "I think so, too. And now you know exactly 
how we felt when you were flirting with Mr. Mason 
at your Lord Mayor's banquet." ^ 

It is said that the people rose with a shout that 
began to be applause and soon became laughter. 
Three groans were given for the late Lord Mayor. Dr. 
Holmes has said: " A cleaner and straighter * counter ' 
than that ... is hardly to be found in the 
records of British pugilism," 

Mr. Beecher followed this hit by saying: "I stand 
here to declare that America is the proper and natural 
ally of Great Britain; I declare that all sorts of alli- 
ances with Continental Nations, as against America, 
are monstrous, and that all flirtations of America with 
pandoured and whiskered foreigners are monstrous, 
and that, in the great conflicts of the future, when 



i<< 



Biography," p. 436. 



THE AMERICAN DEMOSTHENES TRIUMPHS. 339 

civilization is to be extended, when commerce is to be 
free around the globe, and to carry with it religion 
and civilization, then two flags should be flying from 
every man-of-war and every ship, and they should be 
the flag with the cross of St. George, and the flag 
with the stars of promise and of hope." ^ 

At the close of this great address, in some respects 
the most effective and noblest of all his English 
speeches, the resolution of cordial thanks, offered by 
Professor Newman, and seconded, with earnest 
words, by Rev. Newman Hall and Mr. George Thomp- 
son, was carried amidst loud cheers, while only three 
hands were held up against it. 

And so ended the public campaign in England. 
What Mr. Beecher had hoped to accomplish had been 
brought about, and the immense opposition had only 
augmented his triumphs '' The idea of raising lec- 
turers to go through England, and turn the common 
people away from the North and toward the South, 
was now abandoned. The enthusiasm of the whole 
country now ran strongly in the other direction.'"^ 

A prominent English paper is quoted in the 
" Biography " as saying that " before he left England 
he had thoroughly gained the sympathies of the 
people for the cause of the North, and he had no 
small share in averting a collision, which at one period 
of the Civil War threatened ominously between this 
country and the United States." And prominent 
New York journals claimed that, from the whole tone 
of the British press, it was evident that Mr. Beecher 

* " Patriotic Addresses," p. 570. 

^ From Mr. Beecher's Reminiscences in " Life," p. 180. 



340 HEl^RY WARD BEECHER. 

had hastened a complete revolution of the popular 
feeling of the Kingdom in favor of the National 
cause, and that his English speeches had done more 
for that cause in England and Scotland than all else 
that had been said and written. 

Dr. Lyman Abbott has truthfully characterized the 
English speeches as the greatest oratorical work of 
Mr. Beecher's life, and he thinks the only parallel in 
public effect was that produced by the orations 
of Demosthenes against Philip of Macedon. 

It is safe to say that no other American then living 
could have accomplished what Mr. Beecher did, and 
it is doubtful if any man of this century has been 
gifted with powers of public speech so various, re- 
sourceful, morally noble and impressive, and perma- 
nently effective, as those upon which Mr. Beecher 
drew to the utmost in this heroic and historical cam- 
paign. 

All the forces which may be called hereditary, and 
all those acquired by severe study, widened by vast 
experience, and sharpened and made ready by long 
years of constant practice, were brought into imperial 
and sudden requisition. 

Can we not almost hear the stroke of the black- 
smith's hammer with which his grandfather pounded 
the old anvil as we mark the orator's sledge-hammer 
strokes against the English mobs? The mastery of 
speech inherited, in part from his lion-hearted father, 
which was developed by his youthful readings of 
Shakespeare and Milton and Burke in the old Amherst 
days, and was perfected by nearly thirty years of 
incessant practice from pulpit and platform, had been 
put to the best use and grandest illustration in 



THE AMERICAN DEMOSTHENES TRIUMPHS. 34I 

defending the good old cause which Milton had 
championed, in the land where the poet-Puritan lived 
and died. 

All the traditions and glories of British freedom, 
from the days when Stephen Langton headed the 
Barons at Runnymede down to the time when the 
)^outhful Samuel Adams defended before an English 
Governor the right of resisting oppression; all the 
Christian sentiments and convictions which in noblest 
natures have proved a shield to protect and save the 
weak and wronged; all the fiery patriotism which 
surged in the hearts of a great people, struggling for 
existence and National honor, and blazing forth amid 
the carnage of Shiloh and Gettysburg, lived and 
glowed in this great son of the Puritans whom God 
raised up to plead before England in behalf of 
struggling America, for all that made both nations 
noble and glorious. 

Mr. J. L. Cunningham, of Dundee, Scotland, writes 
that one great result which came out of Mr. Beecher's 
visit to Great Britain, was that " the Nation, as a 
Nation, was so roused up to stand by the North in 
their momentous struggle that the Government, 
which were being wrought upon by Louis Napoleon 
to recognize the South, were compelled to remain 
neutral."* 

What Mr. Beecher wrought by his " logic and his 
love " has been frequently and eloquently told by 
Rev. Newman Hall. 

A series of farewell breakfasts in Lohdon, Man^ 
Chester, and Liverpool followed these historic ad* 

» " Life." p. 368. 



342 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

dresses. The speeches which Mr. Beecher made 
were as admirable as some of his famous public 
orations, and, since he was forced to answer many 
questions put by shrewd men, the intellectual ordeal 
he found much more severe than the physical exhaus- 
tion of the night speeches. 

In the address adopted by two or three hundred 
gentlemen, mostly ministers of different denomina- 
tions who met Mr. Beecher at breakfast in London 
on the 23d of October, it was said of him that ** it is 
known to us that even those who are opposed to war 
under all circumstances, frankly acknowledged that 
the tendency of Mr. Beecher's speeches in Glasgow, 
in Manchester, in Edinburgh, in Liverpool, and pre- 
eminently in London, has been to produce in the 
highest degree international good will. He has 
sought not to irritate but to convince : he has admin- 
istered rebuke with mingled fidelity and affection ; 
he has been courteous without servility, he has met 
passion with patience, prejudice with reason, and 
blind hostility with glowing charity; he has cast 
the seed of truth amid the howling tempest with a 
clear eye and steady hand."^ 

In the address which he made at this farewell break- 
fast he said: " I go home not for the first time believ- 
ing in a special Providence, but to be once more a 
witness to my people of the preciousness and truth of 
the doctrine 'God is present with us.'" In the ad- 
dress made to him at the farewell breakfast given to 
him in Liverpool, October 30th, the Chairman con- 
gratulated Mr. Beecher on the great success of his mis- 



*" Patriotic Addresses," p. 575. 



THE AMERICAN DEMOSTHENES TRIUMPHS. 343 

sion: " You have had large and influential meetings in 
other great towns and cities; and, sir, you have fought 
with beasts at Ephesus, but even here, the closing 
scenes must have convinced you how impotent were tlie 
bellowings and howlings, the occasional bleatings and 
cacklings, of the Southern hirelings to stifle the voice of 
Liverpool for freedom." In his reply, Mr. Beecher 
said that he had no idea how his efforts would be re- 
ceived in America, *^ I think it likely that many papers, 
that have never been ardent admirers of mine, will 
find great fault with my statements, will controvert 
my facts, will traverse my reasonings. I do not know 
but that men will say that I have conceded too much, 
and that, melting under the influence of England, 
I have not been as sturdy in my blows here as I was 
in my own land." ' 

I Similar criticism was made twenty years later of 
another American minister to England, James Russell 
Lowell, one of the sturdiest as well as the most cul- 
tured of Americans, who continued the work of 
international pacification so happily begun by Mr. 
Beecher. 

In his final words he said: "You have made your- 
selves so kind to me that my heart clings to you ; I leave 
not strangers any longer, I leave friends behind. I 
shall probably never, at my time of life — I am now 
fifty years of age, and at that time men seldom make 
great changes, — I shall probably see England no more, 
but I shall never cease to see her; I shall never speak 
any more here, but I shall never cease to be heard in 
England as long as I live. Three thousand miles is 



* " Paliiotic Addresses," p. 627. 



344 HENRY WARD EEECHER. 

not as wide now as your hand; the air is one great 
sounding gallery. What you whisper in your closet 
is heard in the infinite depths of Heaven. God has 
given to the moral power of His Church something 
like His own power. What you do in your pulpits in 
England we hear in America, and what we do in our 
pulpits, you hear and feel here, and so it shall be 
more and more. Across the sea, that is, as it were, 
but a rivulet, we shall stretch out our hands of greet- 
ing to you, and speak words of peace and fraternal 
love. Let us not fail to hear ' Amen * and your re- 
sponsive greeting whenever we call to you in fraternal 
love for liberty, for religion, for the Church of God. 
Farewell." ^ 



* " Patriotic Addresses," p. 639. 



CHAPTER XXXIII. 

THE GREAT WAR DRAMA ENDED. 

Mr. Beecher returned home in November, con- 
scious that, while in England, he had used every 
single faculty and every particle of his strength for 
the service of his imperiled country. He declared 
that he had worked for America with the concen- 
trated essence of his very being. 

On the eve of his departure for England, in a 
familiar lecture to his people, on May 7th, he had 
spoken freely of the prospect of death and of his 
feelings that seemed to him at times indications of 
approaching dissolution. While in England he ex- 
pected to die; he did not believe that he should get 
through his campaign. "I thought at times that I 
should certainly break a blood-vessel or have apo- 
plexy. I did not care; I was as willing to die as ever 
I was, when hungry and thirsty, to take refreshment, 
if I might die for my country." 

He was sick during the long voyage home. The 
ship on which he came was loaded down with mili- 
tary stores destined for the Bermudas, and was full 
of bitter partisans of the South. But the man who 
had made English partisanship of the South unavail- 
ing was lying ill in his cabin. At Halifax he had a 



34^ HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

telegram from his wife which seemed like a vision to 
one who had been shut up so long in darkness and 
suffering. 

He arrived in Boston Saturday night, and landed 
on Sunday abput four o'clock in the morning. A 
custom-house officer said to him: ''If you had come 
in on a week-day, we were to have given you a recep- 
tion that would have made things hum." He re- 
turned to America with an immense increase of popu- 
larity and with far kindlier feelings on the part of 
Mr. Lincoln and his Cabinet. The Administration 
in Washington no longer misinterpreted the severe 
and constant criticisms of 1862 as a mark of hostile 
feeling. Confidential relations were established be- 
tween Mr. Lincoln and himself, and letters passed to 
and fro, and more than once the greatest of American 
orators held conference at Washington with the 
greatest of American statesmen. 

Two grand receptions were given him on his re- 
turn, one in the Academy of Music, Brooklyn, and 
the other in the Academy of Music, New York. An 
admission fee of one dollar for the benefit of tlie San- 
itary Committee did not prevent the Brooklyn people 
from crowding the building on this memorable occa- 
sion with an enthusiastic throng. Dr. Storrs was the 
presiding officer, and eloquently expressed the grateful 
feeling of America for Mr. Beecher's services in in- 
forming the mind of the great middle-class of Eng- 
lishmen so " that the war-ships framed by Confederate 
malice and commercial cupidity to harass our com- 
merce, to break our blockades, or desolate our cities 
were not to be left to steal out to sea from any loose 
interpretation of the law, but were to be kept chained 



THE GREAT WAR DRAMA ENDED. 347 

to the docks and held there by the strong arm of the 
Government." ^ 

Mr. Beecher put no immoderate estimate on his 
services in England, but he believed that his effort 
was timely, and that Grant's victory at Vicksburg 
and Lee's defeat at Gettysburg had helped prepare 
England to listen to his statements. It was his good 
fortune to shake down the fruit which others had 
ripened. 

Mr. N. D. Pratt, in his reminiscenses, writes this 
description of the scene in New York, when the citizens 
of the American metropolis gave Mr. Beecher their 
great welcome: "The Academy was crowded from 
pit to dome; the aisles and platform were full; scores 
of distinguished men were present. Mr. Beecher came 
in at eight o'clock. His entrance was the signal for 
applause and cheers; the audience rising to their feet 
to greet him. He stood motionless for five minutes, 
apparently unmoved, and finally an opportunity was 
given him to speak. He then told of his experiences 
abroad; told in his modest way what he had endeav- 
ored to do for his country, and although the hero of 
the occasion and the recipient of all the honors and 
applause of which any man might be proud and 
which one could never forget, he spoke modestly, in 
a most unassuming manner, and told only of his earn- 
est efforts to serve the country he loved so well and 
to place her rightly before England." 

One of the most interesting experiences of Mr. 
Beecher's life rose out of the warm friendship that 
had sprung up between Mr. Stanton, Secretary of 



'♦ Biography," pp. 437, 438. 



348 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

War, and himself. Hearing that the great Secretary, 
who, like Carnot, organized victory, was sick and 
despondent, and that even his *' Atlantean shoulders, 
fit to bear the weight of mightiest monarchies," were 
breaking down under the enormous burdens of the 
war, Mr. Beecher wrote him an impulsive, cordial, 
tender, sympathetic letter, which greatly touched 
Stanton's heart. " Often and often," wrote Stanton, 
in reply, " in the dark hours, you have come to me, 
and I have longed to hear your voice, feeling that 
above all other men you could cheer, strengthen, 
quiet, and uplift me in this great battle, where, by 
God's Providence, it has fallen upon me to hold a part 
and perform a duty beyond my own strength."^ 

After the surrender of Charleston, in 1865, the 
Secretary wrote Mr. Beecher, in reply to a letter from 
him: ''Your idea of raising the flag over a colored 
school and making our banner the banner of civiliza- 
tion is indeed a noble one and heartily my feelings 
respond to your suggestion." When it was decided, 
later, to celebrate the fall of Fort Sumter by raising 
once more the National flag over its walls, on the 14th 
of April, 1865, Mr, Beecher was invited by the Secre^ 
tary of War to pronounce the public address on that 
great occasion. During the last week of the decisive 
struggle around Richmond, Mr. Stanton communi- 
cated by telegraph with Mr. Beecher after every 
important movement. Some idea of the immense 
excitement and elevation of popular feeling during 
those fateful days may be gathered from an incident 
in Plymouth Church on Sunday, April 2, when, after 



" Biography," p. 448. 



THE GREAT WAR DRAMA ENDED. 349 

the sermon^ a telegram from Stanton was handed to 
Mr. Beecher. The silent reading of it illumined his 
face and made the congregation expectant. Asking 
the thousands present to turn to ^' America," he read 
the dispatch which announced important victories 
for the Union armies after three days hard fighting. 
The noble hymn was sung with streaming eyes and 
all the trumpet-stops of the great organ, drawn out 
to the full, could not drown the voices of solemn 
praise. It is said that more than one strong man, 
when the hymn was ended, dropped into his seat sob- 
bing with thankfulness. 

The steamer Arago sailed from New York for 
Charleston on the 8th of April, having on board not 
only Mr. Beecher but also the pioneer of American 
Abolitionists — William Lloyd Garrison, Rev. Dr. 
Storrs, of Brooklyn, General Anderson, Judge Kelly, of 
Philadelphia, Senator Wilson, Gen. John A. Dix, Rev. 
Samuel Scoville (son-in-law of Mr. Beecher), General 
Doubleday, Mr. George Thompson, and many others. 
The next day General Lee surrendered to Grant, but 
not until the Arago arrived at the harbor of Charles- 
ton was the great news communicated to them from 
another ship. " The wild outcry, the strange caprices 
and exultations of that moment, they never will for- 
get who were present. We were far off from the 
scene of war ; we saw no signs nor tokens ; it was as 
if the heavens had imparted it to us ; but, Oh ! what 
gladness, what ecstasy there was in that news no one 
can know but those who had suffered as we had suf- 
fered."^ 



1 << 



Biography," p. 451. 



350 HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 

On the 14th of April, the hand of Major-General 
Anderson raised, on the broken walls of Sumter, the 
same flag which had been lowered four years before, 
on the 14th of April, 1861. The flag was saluted by a 
hundred guns from Fort Sumter and by a National 
salute from every fort and rebel battery that had fired 
on that historic citadel. ^' Previous to the raising of 
the flag, the steamer Planter^ Captain Robert Smalls, 
which, it will be remembered, ran the rebel gauntlet 
in 1862, came to the Fort loaded down with between 
two and three thousand of the emancipated race of 
all ages and sizes. Their appearance was warmly 
welcomed and their joy unbounded."* 

The raising of the flag was itself indefinitely more 
eloquent than any words that even Mr. Beechercould 
utter, and yet his words were among the wisest 
and noblest that he ever spoke. He began with a 
prayer that the uplifted flag might ever be crowned 
with honor and protected from treason. He described 
how the glorious banner had been shot down ; how 
after the long night of four years, it was devoutly 
raised again. Rebellion had perished but the flag 
had not ; the Nation exulted not for passions grati- 
fied but for truth victorious ; the restoration of the 
fiag meant the restoration of a vindicated Nation. 
The raising of the banner brought back better bless- 
ings than those of old. He recalled the memories of 
the fathers, and how the fathers of the men who had 
fired on the flag would themselves have been willing 
to die for it. The banner which came back to its old 
place was now the banner of Emancipation. Old 



^ "William Lloyd Garrison," Vol. IV., pp. 141-142. 



THE GREAT WAR DRAMA ENDED. 35 1 

things had passed away, all things were to be made 
new. Society was to be reorganized on sounder 
foundations ; the uplifted flag meant indivisible 
National Government; it meant that the States were 
not absolute sovereigns and had no right to secede ; 
it meant that slavery was for ever gone. 

In words of terrible picturesqueness he described 
the hideous vastness and infernal horrors of the war 
which had been ended, and he recited how the ruling 
class of the South, the aristocracy of the plantations, 
had deliberately, secretly, unscrupulously planned 
the disruption of the Nation that they might found a 
slave-empire — " an armed band of pestilent conspir- 
ators seeking the Northern life." He charged the 
whole guilt of the war upon the ambitious, educated, 
plotting, political leaders of the South. 

In these days of restored national good-feeling, in 
this golden age of fraternity between the North and 
South, which Mr. Beecher, perhaps more than any 
one else, helped to usher in, some of his sentences in 
the Fort Sumter flag-raising speech, seem utterly 
unlike his general spirit. What indignation he felt, 
he launched at the leaders of the rebellion, but this 
never prevented his cherishing the warmest kindness 
toward the Southern people. 

He said: "A day will come when God will reveal 
judgment and arraign at His bar these mighty mis- 
creants; and then every orphan that their bloody 
game has made, and every widow that sits sorrowing, 
and every maimed and wounded sufferer, and every 
bereaved heart in all the wide regions of this land, 
will rise up and come before the Lord to lay upon 
these chief culprits of modern history their awful 



352 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

testimony. And from a thousand battlefields shall 
rise up armies of airy witnesses, who, with the 
memory of their awful sufferings, shall confront these 
miscreants with shrieks of fierce accusation; and 
every pale and starved prisoner shall raise his skinny 
hand in judgment. Blood shall call out for vengeance 
and tears plead for justice, and grief shall silentl)'' 
beckon, and love, heart-smitten, shall wail for justice. 
Good men and angels will cry out, * How long. Oh 
Lord, how long, wilt Thou not avenge ?' " 

Sternly indignant as these words are, Mr. Beecher 
rises at once still higher in his righteous wrath 
against deliberate wickedness, and his words seem 
a strong echo of what Milton had written two hun- 
dred years before in the most magnificent passage of 
English prose. The orator said: " And then these 
guiltiest and most remorseless traitors, these high and 
cultured men with might and wisdom, used for the 
destruction of their country; these most accursed and 
detested of all criminals that have drenched a conti- 
nent in needless blood and moved the foundations of 
their times with hideous crimes and cruelty, caught up 
in black clouds full of voices of vengeance and lurid 
with punishment, shall be whirled aloft and plunged 
downward for ever and for ever in an endless retribu- 
tion; while God shall say, 'Thus shall it be to all 
who betray their country,' and all in heaven and upon 
earth will say, ' Amen.' " ^ 

But for the misled people of the South there was 
not one word or trace of animosity. On the contrary, 
there was nothing but fraternal kindness. He believed 



1 << 



Patriotic Addresses," pp. 688-C89. 



THE GREAT WAR DRAMA ENDED. 353 

that through the agency of the Civil War the Nation 
had attained its manhood; that, as a people, we had 
something to be proud of; that in four years we had 
made the advance of half a century; that an educated 
and moral people had been shown to be equal to all 
the exigences of National life; that we had proved 
ourselves to be of all nations the most dangerous 
and yet the least to be feared; that deadly doctrines 
had been purged away in blood; that the moral and 
military capacity of the black race had been proved; 
that, thenceforth, the industry of the Southern States 
was to rest on better foundations, and that, with the 
destruction of class-interests, a new era of pros- 
perity would dawn on the laboring people of the 
South. 

From that historic pulpit of broken stones on the 
walls of Fort Sumter, he offered most grateful thanks 
to the members of the National Government, to the 
officers and men of the army and navy, to the true 
and faithful citizens — men and women — who had 
borne up with unflinching hope in the darkest hours 
and covered the land with labors of love; and, above 
all, to the God of the fathers, he gave thanksgiving 
and praise. Who, from such a harvest of war, had 
brought forth the seed of so much liberty and peace. 

He also offered to the President of the United 
States solemn congratulations that God had sustained 
his life under unparelleled burdens, and permitted him 
to see that consummation for which he had toiled with 
such unselfish wisdom. Alas, the good President was 
never to receive this greeting. The day on which 
the flag was lifted on Sumter was the last day of Mr. 
Lincoln's conscious life. 

23 



354 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

"Oh Captain, my Captain, our fearful trip is done, 
The ship has weathered every rock, the prize we sought is won, 
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, 
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring : 

But oh Heart, Heart, Heart, 
Oh the bleeding drops of red. 
Where on the deck my Captain lies 
Fallen cold and dead." 

After two days spent in visiting Charleston, Mr. 
Beecher's party proceeded to Hilton Head, and thence 
made an excursion on the Government steamer to 
Beaufort. As they were going back to the boat, after 
inspecting the points of interest there, the news of 
Mr. Lincoln's assassination darkened all their joyous- 
ness. In the midst of the silence which followed the 
terrible news, Mr. Beecher said: "It is time all good 
men were at home." 

With what changed feelings did this memorable 
party reenter the harbor of New York ! As Mr. 
Beecher said in his sermon in memory of Lincoln: 
*' Did ever so many hearts in so brief a time touch 
two such boundless feelings? It was the uttermost of 
joy; it was the uttermost of sorrow — noon and mid- 
night without a space between. The blow brought 
not a sharp pang. It was so terrible that at first it 
stunned sensibility. Citizens were like men awakened 
at midnight by an earthquake, and bewildered to 
find that everything they were accustomed to trust 
wavering and falling. The very earth was no longer 
solid." ^ 

In closing this sermon on Lincoln he said: Four 



Patriotic Addresses," p. 704. 



THE GREAT WAR DRAMA ENDED. 355 

years ago, Oh Illinois, we took from your midst an 
untried man and from among the people; we return 
him to you a mighty conqueror. Not thine any more, 
but the Nation's; not ours, but the World's. Give him 
place, ye prairies! In the midst of this great con- 
tinent his dust shall rest, a sacred altar to myriads 
who shall make pilgrimage to that shrine to kindle 
anew their zeal and patriotism. Ye winds, that move 
over the mighty places of the West, chant his requiem! 
Ye people, behold a martyr whose blood, as so many 
articulate words, pleads for fidelity, for law, for 
liberty." ' 



^ •* Patriotic Addresses," p. 712. 



CHAPTER XXXIV. 

BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS. 

Mr. Beecher's historic career as a reformer may 
now be said to have ended. Whatever services he 
thenceforth rendered to his country were largely 
those of a wise, patriotic, conservative man, sometimes 
•mistaken, perhaps, in the timeliness of his efforts, but 
earnest to heal the wounds of war. Possessing no 
vindictiveness of spirit, and having a superabundant 
charity for the South, he argued for a speedy read- 
mission of the Southern States to their old places in 
the Union. 

President Johnson's plan of Reconstruction was 
fiercely antagonized by the great mass of the Repub- 
lican party, who justly felt the necessity of first se- 
curing guarantees for the rights of the imperiled 
black man. 

The proposition to make an example of Jefferson 
Davis appeared to Mr. Beecher ridiculous and wrong. 
" The war itself is the most terrific warning that 
could be set up, and to attempt by erecting against 
this lurid background the petty figure of a gallows, 
with a man dangling at it to heighten the effect, 
would be like lighting tapers when God's lightnings 
are flashing across the heavens to add grandeur to 
the storm." 

In the sermon, preached October 29, 1865, he said: 
" There are many who desire to see the South hum- 



BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS. 357 

bled. For my own part, I think it to be the great 
need of this Nation to save the self-respect of the 
South. I am very thankful that those who have been 
representative men in the North, in the main — 
Gerritt Smith, Garrison, and others such as they, — 
have been found pleading for leniency, and opposed 
to rigor and uncharitableness." 

Mr. Beecher did not favor the immediate readmis- 
sion of the States without conditions. He believed 
that, first, the States of the South should establish for 
the freedman his right to labor, to hold property, his 
equality before the law, and his full protection, and 
he also took the ground that the right of suffrage 
should be granted him. " Without such provision 
much mischief will doubtless rise." 

In February, 1866, Mr. Beecher replied to Wendell 
Phillips's famous lecture called " The South Vic- 
torious," by delivering a speech called " The North 
Victorious." In this lecture he said: "I rely 
upon reason and conscience. Churches are my 
Congresses, and schoolhouses my legislators. Kind- 
ness, equal reciprocal or identical interests, — these 
are renovating influences; and I would not wait 
too long for laws which, at best, are but mills which 
must be run by external powers." 

" My heart goes out toward my whole country. I 
mourn for those outcast States. The bitterness of 
their destruction; the wrath that has come upon them; 
their desolation — you know nothing of these. The 
sublimest monument that has ever been reared in this 
world to justify God's abhorrence of cruelty and re- 
bellion has its base as broad as fifteen States." 

Mr. Beecher had written President Johnson of his 



358 HENRY WARD I3EECHER. 

earnest desire that the Government should not invade 
the true rights of tlie States, and also of the necessity 
of securing for the freedmen the kindness of South- 
ern white men. In the autumn of 1866, Mr. Beecher 
wrote his famous letter to the National Convention of 
Soldiers and Sailors in Cleveland, which disfavored 
the policy of exclusion. In this letter he advocated 
the prompt readmission of the Southern States, and 
expressed the conviction that delay complicated the 
situation, embittered the exiled people, and made in- 
dispensable the use of the army in support of local 
government. 

** To keep half a score of States under Federal au- 
thority, but without national ties and responsibilities; 
to oblige the central authority to govern half the ter- 
ritory of the Union by Federal civil officers and by the 
army, is a policy not only uncongenial to our ideas 
and principles, but preeminently dangerous to the 
spirit of our Government. " ^ 

It is not necessary to rehearse the arguments of this 
famous letter, which brought down upon its author a 
storm of fierce dissent. Probably in all his life Mr. 
Beecher was never attacked so bitterly by so many 
persons, whose good will he valued, as after the appear- 
ance of the Cleveland letter. He had resigned the 
editorship of the New York Independent^ although he 
still remained a regular contributor to it. The new 
editor, Theodore Tilton, attacked his old friend with 
ferocious bitterness, and from this time Mr. Beecher 
felt that he could no longer be connected with that 
journal in any way, and therefore terminated his con- 



^*' Patnolic Addresses," p. 738. 



BLESSED ARK THE PEACEMAKERS. 359 

tract with it. The public temper would not tolerate 
wiiat was deemed a surrender to the South. 

In a letter to Dr. Stephen H. Tyng, who had writ- 
ten Mr. Beecher cordially approving his course, he 
said: "I am very far from being a Johnson man. I 
am an advocate of the principles of speedy readjust- 
ment without waiting for a greater, but at present un- 
attainable, good." Although, like many other men of 
the North, he had spoken high and extravagant 
words of praise of Mr. Johnson, he felt that now the 
President was the greatest obstacle to the success of 
his own views, and said that, if the choice ever came 
between a Copperhead Johnson party and Radical 
Republicanism, he would not for a moment hesitate to 
join with the Republicans. " The moral sentiment of 
justice, liberty and Christian progress, is with the Re- 
publican side." 

What he feared most was that the Southern freed- 
men might be ground to powder between the very 
Southern South and the very Northern North. Many 
of his friends were apprehensive that he was going 
over to the enemy. Dr. Storrs wrote him on the 
7th of September: " A vast number of people, who 
have loved and honored you for years, are really be- 
coming to believe that you have gone over bodily. Of 
course, all those who know you as I do, know this to 
be an utter misapprehension of your position." ^ 

Many years later Mr. Beecher said of the Cleveland 
letter: " I am going to send down that document to 
my children as one of the most glorious things I ever 
did in my life." 



' " Biography," p. 471. 



360 HENRY WARD I^EECHER. 

In a second letter, written September 8, 1866, he 
gave a fuller expression of his views, advocating a 
middle course between that of the President and that 
of Congress. He declared that the attempt to class 
him with men whom, all his life, he had utterly 
opposed, had failed. It was with a firm and pathetic 
assurance that the future would justify his consis- 
tency and his wisdom that he said: "I have done 
nothing to forfeit the good name which I have 
earned." 

And the closing words of this letter deserve to be 
held in lasting remembrance. " Better days are 
coming. These throes of our day are labor pains. 
In some moments, which it pleases God to give me, I 
think I discern beyond the present troubles, and over 
the other side of the abyss in which the Nation wal- 
lows, that beautiful form of Liberty — God's dear 
child — whose whole beauty was never yet disclosed. I 
know her solemn face. That she is divine I know by 
her purity, by her scepter of j ustice, and by that atmos- 
phere of Love that, issuing from her, as light from a 
star, moves with her as a royal atmosphere."^ 

It became apparent, as the storm of excitement 
subsided, that it was not his purpose to leave his party 
friends, and surrender the work of reconstruction to 
the men whom he had always distrusted, but that, 
within the lines of the Republican party, he and 
those who thought with him were to toil for the 
speedy restoration of the Southern States. 

One incident, partly ecclesiastical and partly con- 
nected with the war and Mr. Beecher's campaign in 



*" Patriotic Addresses," p. 749, 



BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS. 361 

England, deserves to be noted before the narrative of 
this epoch in his career is finished. It is described in 
the words of the Rev. Dr. J. G. Merrill, pastor of 
the Second Parish Church in Portland, Maine. He 
calls the incident the greatest event that he ever wit- 
nessed in his life. " The Congregational Council of 
1865, which met in Boston, strangely enough found 
among its delegates sent from Great Britain men who 
had sympathized with the Confederacy. That such 
men should have been sent to the Council angered 
not a few of the delegates who had been in the army 
of the Union. Among those who felt aggrieved was 
Chaplain Quint, who took occasion to tell of the 
British bullets and blankets that he had seen in the 
hands of the Confederates, and of the lack of loyalty 
to the cause of human freedom on the part of 
the Churches in the mother country, which were now 
represented in the Council by a delegation whose 
recorded utterances had been far from loyal to the 
Union. 

" The confusion and consternation occasioned by 
this speech can hardly be imagined. The soldier del- 
egates were many of them glad that the sentiments 
which they felt, had been so vigorously uttered. 
Others, sensitive to the courtesies of the occasion, 
were greatly disturbed that the guests of the Council 
had been so roughly handled. Was there any man 
to bring order out of the confusion that ensued? The 
Moderator could not do it. The call came from all 
parts of the house: * Beecher, * ' Beecher,' 'Henry 
Ward Beecher. ' Mr. Beecher declined to speak. Dr. 
Joseph P. Thompson, of the Broadway Tabernacle, 
New York, came to the platform, and spoke with all 



362 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

of the eloquence at his command. He accomplished 
nothing. 

" The call was again made for Mr. Beecher. He 
yielded. Coming to the pulpit from behind, his 
whole frame was quivering with emotion. With his 
full voice he burst forth. ' I have seen the time when I 
have wished England was damned.' Then followed a 
torrent of righteous indignation, succeeded by words 
of conciliation, without the least compromise of 
patriotism, until at last he uttered this challenge: 
* We are ready to forget the past; the future is before 
us, — it is ours to evangelize the world, and in carry- 
ing forward this great undertaking, I am ready to 
grasp the hands of our English brethren, and say 
that America will put two men into the field where 
England has one, and that each American will do the 
work of two Englishmen! ' He was then at the very 
front of the platform, the English delegates directly 
before him. They grasped his outstretched hands; 
the whole congregation rose to their feet. With tears, 
shouts, waving of handkerchiefs, and other demon- 
strations of delight, they were as one man carried cap- 
tive by the only man of our generation who could 
have, in one short address, molded into enthusiastic 
Christian unity a company of scholarly, ordinarily 
undemonstrative, men, who had become sharply 
divided along lines of deepest convictions and in the 
hours when prejudice was most profound."^ 



' From an Unpublished Letter, May 15, 1893. 



CHAPTER XXXV. 



IN LABORS MORE ABUNDANT. 



Mr. Beecher remained during the twenty-one years 
which followed the Cleveland episode a large and 
potent factor in American political and religious life. 
It cannot be said, however, with truth that his influ- 
ence continually increased, with no serious interrup- 
tions, as the years went by. He was preeminently 
fitted for the great work that closed with the de- 
struction of American slavery. He had great quali- 
fications, springing largely from his broad and 
wholesome moral nature, for the wise and restraining 
guidance of the victorious North. His robust com- 
mon sense kept him from making egregious mistakes 
during the years when financial difficulties were up- 
permost. Unlike Wendell Phillips, he was not swept 
into the greenback heresy. 

But during the last twenty years of his life Mr, 
Beecher did not count for a supreme reformatory 
force in American life. Of course he always stood 
firm and strong for honesty and purity in national 
and municipal government, but having expended the 
immense force of his reformatory energies in that 
gigantic moral conflict which culminated in the Civil 
War, he never appeared, except in his pulpit, in all his 



364 HENRY WARD REECHER. 

greatness during the years which followed the death 
of slavery. 

As a preacher he was probably never so great, his 
mind was never so fertile, his wisdom, adaptation, and 
power in expression were never so wonderful, as in the 
years extending from 1865 to 1877. The evolution of 
his mind resulted in several important theological 
changes, but Mr. Beecher's efforts in theological re- 
form, although worthy of attentive study, and 
doubtless to a degree useful, did not contribute 
largely to his general repute. He seemed hasty, care- 
less, and extravagant. 

It may be too early to estimate aright what he did 
as a theological reformer, but it is safe to say that his 
work was not all pure gold. He certainly offended 
many, whom a gentler and more careful treatment 
would have enlightened. He frequently made the 
mistake of contributing heat where light would have 
been more helpful, and he sometimes offered the 
illumination of scientific light where a little of his 
old-time heat would have proved more effective. 

Mr. Beecher during the last twenty years of his life 
remained the foremost preacher of Christendom. 
Abounding in wisdom, and fertile in fancy, loving in 
speech, and lofty in spirit, he continued his expositions 
of Divine truth; but though he was unequaled as a 
reformer in the anti-slavery crusade, the pulpit 
Jupiter was no great figure in the temperance fight in 
America. The temperance reform, which is funda- 
mental to all reforms, swept on without his making 
any supreme contributions of force and wise direc- 
tion. In his two sermons, published by the National 
Temperance Society, — '^ Common Sense for Young 



IN LABORS MORE ABUNDANT. 365 

Men " and " Love and Liberty " — he teaches much 
wholesome truth, but he never entered into the tem- 
perance crusade, certainly not in his later years, with 
the vigor and enthusiasm which characterized the 
supreme efforts of his life. In temperance annals 
Wendell Phillips, Neal Dow, John B. Gough, Joseph 
Cook, Canon Farrar, Thedore L. Cuyler, Francis 
Murphy, and Miss Frances E. Willard are greater, 
names than his. 

He was a powerful advocate of woman-suffrage, 
but Mr. Beecher was not eminent, according to the 
splendor of his genius, in those questions of Capital 
and Labor which involve such vital interests. To 
younger Americans, Lyman Abbott, Joseph Cook,' 
Washington Gladden, Richard T. Ely, and many be- 
sides was left the fruitful and adequate study and 
setting forth of that advancing revolution, which, if 
this Christian spirit is to rule, will substitute cooper- 
ation for competition in the industrial world. And 
yet, in one sermon, that on Capital and Labor, deliv- 
ered on March 28, 1886, he unfolded with rare, com- 
prehensive wisdom the fundamental Christian laws 
of this industrial revolution. " I speak the very heart 
of the Gospel when I say that Christianity in our day 
looks to the bottom rather than to the top." ^ 

The last thirteen years of Mr. Beecher's life were 
overclouded by a great scandal which involved his 
character, reputation, and influence. The grandeur of 
his manhood, and its conspicuous defects as well, be- 
came prominent during that almost unparalleled 
trial. Seen at a distance of fifty years, perhaps this 



* The Brooklyn Magazine ^ Apnl, 1886, p. 27. 



366 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

much-enduring man who maintained the sweetness 
and integrity of his soul through that long and 
agonizing ordeal, will appear greater even than the 
pulpit orator who made the platform of Plymouth 
Church a turning-point in history and a starting- 
point for humanity's better future. 

The days of the greatest prosperity for Plymouth 
Church were perhaps the twelve years which followed 
the war, and the culminating point in Mr. Beecher's 
career, so far as popular applause is concerned, may 
be said to have been the " Silver Wedding, " the 
week of Jubilee, in October, 1872. The history of 
those twenty-five years included Mr. Beecher's great- 
est work as a reformer and the achievement of his 
world-wide fame and influence as a preacher. "His 
sermons were copied weekly by hundreds of papers 
throughout the world, and thus found their way to 
thousands upon thousands of firesides, where other- 
wise they would never have been known. " ^ These 
sermons were translated into French, Spanish, Ger- 
man, and Italian, and, " from his pulpit v»rent forth 
words of cheer, of hope and love, that lifted up weary 
hearts, that infused new life in the despairing, that 
shed a new light upon spirits that had lived in the 
darkness of sin, throughout all the civilized globe. " * 

Before the " Silver Wedding," Mr. Beecher had 
built up a happy and harmonious Church organiza- 
tion with nearly three thousand members, and had 
helped to nurse into vigorous life the three fruitful 
Sunday-schools — Plymouth, Bethel and Mayflower — 



* T. J. Ellinwood in ihft Phonographic World, April, 18S7, 

* " Biography " — Page 479, 



IN LABORS MORE ABUNDANT. 367 

wherein about three thousand pupils were taught and 
trained. 

Mr. Beecher had already written his only novel — 
" Norwood " — a tale of village life in New England. 
He had been a contributor to the New York Ledger, 
and his one story was published in that paper in 1867, 
the owner of the paper giving him twenty-five 
thousand dollars for it. Mr. Beecher confesses that 
if it had not been for Mr. Robert Bonner, the pro- 
prietor of the Ledger, " Norwood " would never have 
been written. He was not a great reader of fiction, 
and was unfamiliar " with the mystery of their con- 
struction." The proposition to write a novel was 
almost as startling as *' a request to carve a statue or 
build a man of-war." 

But Ml Beecher had a wide knowledge of life 
in New England as well as a wide understanding 
of human nature in general. Besides, he had a habit 
" of looking upon men as the children of God and 
heirs of immortality " so that all human life had 
dignity in his eyes. These considerations came to 
his aid and relief, and the result was a decision to 
write the book which his friend so strongly urged 
him to undertake. 

" Norwood " has no plot worth mentioning. Many 
school-girls of to-day are able to write what is artisti- 
cally a better story. But " Norwood " is filled with 
splendid " Beecherisms": it is starred with passages 
that shine with a noble and lasting beauty. It has 
wit and humor enough to make a great reputation 
for smaller men and it is immensely helpful to those 
who wish to know New England or to learn of the 
training, opinions and personal peculiarities of one 



368 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

of New England's greatest sons — Henry Ward 
Beecher. 

Before the "Silver Wedding" he had also written 
the first volume of his Life of Jesus, the Christ. He 
undertook this "in the hope of inspiring a deeper 
interest in the noble Personage of whom those match- 
less histories, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, 
and John, are the chief authentic memorials. I have 
endeavored to present scenes that occurred two 
thousand years ago as they would appear to modern 
eyes if the events had taken place in our day." ^ 

Horace Greeley who had so keen and accurate a 
knowledge of the American common people, ex- 
pressed the confident opinion that five hundred thou- 
sand copies of the book would be sold. The " scandal '* 
which soon followed the issue of the first volume led 
to the suspension of the publication. But for that 
direful event, such were Mr. Beeclier's influence and 
reputation at that time, the work w^ould probably 
have proved as great a literary success as General 
Grant's Memoirs. 

Mr. Beecher, while not equipped with the wide 
and special learning which Farrar, Gelkie, Eder- 
sheim, and many others have brought to the elucida- 
tion of the one Supreme Life, possessed other emi- 
nent qualities for setting vividly before men the 
World's Redeemer. He proposed to himself not a 
controversial life, but such a portrayal of the Son of 
God as would remove the grounds for the common 
objections to the Gospel histories. "Writing in full 
sympathy with the Gospels as authentic historical 



* Preface to the " Life of Chiisi." 



IN LABORS MORE ABUNDANT. 369 

documents, and with the nature and teachings of the 
great Personage whom they describe, it is scarcely- 
necessary to say that I have not attempted to show 
the world what Matthew and John ought to have 
heard and seen but did not; nor what things they did 
not see or hear, but in their simplicity believed they 
did. In short, I have not invented a Life of Jesus to 
suit the critical philosophy of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. " ' 

Through all his life, whatever theological changes 
occurred in regard to Christian philosophy or inter- 
pretations of the Scriptures, Mr. Beecher always 
stood firm on the basis of historic Christianity as set 
forth in the Apostles' Creed. " The miraculous ele- 
ment," he believed, '* constitutes the very nerve-system 
of the Gospel. To withdraw it from credence is to 
leave the Gospel history a mere shapeless mass of 
pulp. " 

*' That Christ should be the center and active cause 
of such stupendous imposture, on the supposition 
that miracles were but deceptions, shocks the moral 
feeling of those even who disbelieve His divinity. " " 

No other of the modern biographers Oi Jesus has 
written anything more beautiful than the " Overture 
of Angels," the second chapter of Mr. Beecher's first 
volume. A score of pages might here be reproduced 
from this book enriched with some of the choicest 
spiritual thoughts in the English language. It is 
doubtful if Mr. Beecher's marvelous power with 
words and his equally wonderful insight into truth 
can anywhere else be seen to better advantage than in 

* Preface, p. v. ^ ** Life of Jesus, the Christ," pp. 9, 10. 
24 



370 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

the first volume of the " Life of Christ." The closing 
passage which follows the account of Christ's para- 
bolic preaching by the Sea of Galilee, may serve as a 
good illustration of Mr. Bcecher's great power with 
words. 

" The Voice ceased. The crowd disappeared. The 
light that had sparkled along the waters and fired 
the distant hills went out. Twilight came on; the 
evening winds whispered among the rustling reeds, 
and the ripples gurgling upon the beach, answered 
them in liquid echoes. The boom of the solitary bit- 
tern came over the waters, and now and then, as 
darkness fell upon the lake, the call of the fishermen, 
at their night-toil. The crowd dispersed. The world 
received its own again. With darkness came forget- 
fulness, leaving but a faint memory of the Voice, or 
of its teachings, as of a wind whispering among 
the fickle reeds. The enthusiasm of the throng, like 
the last rays of the sun, died out: and their hearts, 
like the sea, again sent incessant desires murmuring 
and complaining to the shore. " 

In January, 1870, Mr. Beecher assumed control of 
the Christian Unio7i and that paper achieved almost 
immediately an immense circulation and seemed 
likely to become at a bound the leading Christian 
journal of America. In his salutatory he said: " Be- 
lieving that at heart there is in common a Divine 
Life in all sects, we seek to be in sympathy with 
them in the things that are nearest to Divine love 
and purity: and we shall assert in all other things — 
organizations, policies, philosophies — the liberty of 
all Churches to have their own way according to 
the best light of an instructed conscience, and also 



IN LABORS MORE ABUNDANT. 37 1 

we shall defend in all the utmost liberty of dissent; 
thus seeking for a unity of the Spirit while we shall 
regard without alarm a diversity of manifestations. " 
In 1871, Henry W. Sage, of Brooklyn, one of the 
leading members of the Plymouth congregation, 
founded the Lyman Beecher Lectureship of Preach- 
ing for the Divinity School of Yale College. Early 
in 1872 Mr. Beecher gave his first course of twelve 
lectures on this foundation. After hearing one of 
these lectures, Dr. Leonard Bacon said: "If I had 
heard such talk as that before I began to preach 
it would have made a better preacher of me.'* 
Many men now living remember these marvelous 
discourses and the delivery of them as notable events 
in their lives. At the close of the first course, Pro- 
fessors Bacon, Harris, Day, Hoppin, Fisher, and 
Dwight, had written to him a highly commendatory 
letter in which they said of these addresses: " We 
value them for the views which they give of elo- 
quence in general, and of that eloquence in particu- 
ular which seeks to save men by the exposition and 
application of the Gospel. We value them for the 
inspiring and stimulating effect on the hearers and 
the high ideals which they hold up for ministers and 
students for the ministry. " Prof. Hoppin has called 
Mr. Beecher "an epoch-making man." The "Yale 
Lectures on Preaching" reveal the sources of this 
epoch-making power. 



CHAPTER XXXVI. 

SUNSHINE BEFORE THE STORM. 

Fresh from all the manifold victories which he had 
achieved as preacher, reformer, patriot, author, lect- 
urer, and editor, Mr. Beecher entered with his people 
into the joys of the " Silver-Wedding " services. 
There were secret sorrows eating at his heart even 
then. Some of his friends afterwards said that it 
seemed as if God was to give an unequaled trial to His 
servant lest in some way he should become puffed up 
on account of his unequaled achievements. Troubles 
had been brewing which he knew were liable to bring 
results of great seriousness to himself and his people. 
He carried all through that great week of jubilee a 
brave and thankful heart. Personal glorification he 
loathed. He meant to make the celebration a rehearsal 
of what the Lord had done through his people, of 
what the preaching of Jesus Christ had wrought 
through that great Christian family which for twenty- 
five years he had been gathering about him. 

It is delightful to read the picturesque accounts 
which have been given us of that memorable week ; 
how Monday morning, at an early prayer-meeting, 
words of devout thanks were spoken, and the prayer- 
ful spirit which had characterized the beginning of 
Plymouth Church was made gloriously evident ; how 



SUNSHINE BEFORE THE STORM. 373 

in the afternoon of Monday a great procession of 
children filed by the pastor's door-step, and each one 
cast a flower at his feet ; and how, at the close of the 
parade, the scholars repaired to the beautifully-deco- 
rated church and, with music by the United States 
Marine Band, with prayer, with singing, and with a 
noble address by Rev. Dr. Henry Martyn Scudder, 
the Children's Day was ended. 

We read with interest of the morning prayer-meet- 
ing on Tuesday. It was Officers' and Teachers' Day 
and in the evening Mr. Bell, Mr. Elwell, Mr. 
Bowen, Mr. Andrew A. Smith, Dr. H. E. Morrill, and 
others, recalled events in the history of the three Sun- 
day-schools. 

Wednesday, or Members' Day, was the day of broth- 
erhood, which recalled that for twenty-five years no 
meeting had ever been summoned to settle a quarrel 
in Plymouth Church. Captain Duncan spoke of the 
glorious revival of 1857-8, and Mr. Beecher brought 
to mind with affectionate gratitude the character and 
services of the older members, Edward Corning, 
"Brother Burgess," Benjamin Flanders,Captain Chase, 
and Mr. Atkinson. In the evening exercises there 
was an elaborate musical programme. Mr. Beecher 
gave pleasant reminiscences, and Mr. Cutter and Mr, 
Bowen entered carefully into the earlier and later his- 
tory of the church. Among other things Mr. Bowen 
said : "During the late war, no Church, or congre- 
gation, or minister, did more than Plymouth Church 
and Mr. Beecher toward the overthrow of the rebel- 
lion, by contributions of men and money." Letters 
from Mr. John T. Howard, then a resident of Chicago, 
from Dr. Horace Bushnell, from " An Aged Member,'* 



374 HENRY WARD BEECHF.R. 

and from a " Young Member," added to the interest 
of the happy evening. 

Thursday was Historical Day. John Zundel, for 
more than twenty years the organist of the church, 
told of the great influence which Mr. Beecher had 
exerted in promoting good church music, and among 
other things he said: "Twenty-five years ago, I 
think God sent me from my home to Brooklyn, and I 
thank Him to-day that ever he sent me here. When 
I came here, though I was a member of the church, I 
knew nothing of my Saviour. When I came, though 
I had a belief in Heaven, I knew nothing about it in 
my heart. Plymouth Church to me is the thing that 
has made me to know my Saviour. Plymouth 
Church to me is the thing that opened heaven, 
and let me see in. And although I cannot find 
words to speak, this morning, I do want you all 
to believe that the reason I love Plymouth Church 
so much, and the reason I love that man so much, is 
because through her and through him I came to know 
my blessed Saviour." ^ 

At the crowded evening service which was attended 
by Dr. Cuyler, Dr. Edward Beecher, Dr. Budington, 
and Dr. Storrs, Mr. Beecher gave the historical 
address from which frequent quotation has been made 
in this volume. And this was followed by an address 
of congratulation from Dr. Storrs of the Church of 
the Pilgrims. Mr. Beecher's words probably never 
eclipsed the splendid power of this memorable speech 
of his friend, which abounded with fire and fun, with 
discriminating analyses of Mr. Beecher's power, with 



!•< 



Plymouih Church Silver Wedding," p. 57. 



SUNSHINE BEFORE THE STORM. 375 

noble tributes to his usefulness, and witii passages so 
full of generous feeling and exalted sentiment, that 
they have lived in the memories of thousands. Tlie 
closing paragraphs have often been published, and 
critics have justly deemed them among the most 
remarkable sentences in the history of superb and 
stately eloquence. Every Life of Mr. Beecher should 
include the magnificent closing passage: 

"At any rate, we have stood side by side in all these 
j'^ears and they have been wonderful and eventful 
years. 

" 'Our eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, 
When he loosed the fateful lightnings of His terrible swift 

sword. 
And His truth went marching on ! ' 

"We have differed many times, but two men so 
unlike never stood side by side with each other for so 
long a time, in more perfect harmony, without a jeal- 
ousy or a jar ! Though we have differed in opinion, 
we have never differed in feeling. We have walked 
to the graves of friends in company. We have sat at 
the table of our Lord in company. He knows, as he 
has said, that when other voices were loud and fierce 
in hostility to him, mine never joined them. When 
other pens wrote his name, dropping gall and venom 
as they wrote it, my pen never touched the paper 
except in honor and admiration of him. And 1 know 
that whenever I have wanted counsel or courage given 
me from others, he has always been ready, from the 
overflowing surplus of his surcharged mind, to give 
them to me. 

" So we have stood side by side — blessed be God!— 



376 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

in no spirit but of fraternal love, for that long space 
of twenty-five years, which began with the Right 
Hand of Fellowship then, and closes before you here 
to-night. 

** I am not here, my friend, to repeat the service 
which then I performed. It would be superfluous. 
When I think of the great assemblies that have surged 
and thronged around this platform ; when I think of 
the influences that have gone out from this pulpit 
into all the earth, I feel that less than almost any 
other man on earth does he need the assurance of 
fellowship from any but the Son of God ! But I am 
here to-night for another and different service. On 
behalf of you who tarry, and those who have ascended 
from this congregation ; on behalf of Christians of 
every name throughout our city, who have had such 
joy and pride in him, and the name of whose town 
has, by him, been made famous in the earth ; on behalf 
of all our Churches now growing to be an army ; on 
behalf of those in every part of our land who have 
never seen his face or heard his voice, but who have 
read and loved his sermons, and been quickened and 
blessed by them ; on behalf of the great multitudes 
who have gone up from every land which his sermons 
have reached, never having touched his hand on earth, 
but waiting to greet him by and by ; I am here to- 
night to give him the Right Hand of Congratulation 
on the closing of this twenty-fifth year of his ministry, 
and to say : God be praised for all the work that 
you have done here ! God be praised for the generous 
gifts which He has showered upon you, and the gener- 
ous use you have made of them, here and elsewhere, 
and everywhere in the land ! God give you many happy 



SUNSHINE BEFORE THE STORM. 377 

and glorious years of work and joy still to come in your 
ministry on earth ! May your soul, as the years go on, 
be whitened more and more, in the radiance of God's 
light, and in the sunshine of His love ! And, when the 
end comes — as it will — may the gates of pearl swing 
inward for your entrance, before the hands of those 
who have gone up before you, and who now wait to 
welcome you thither ! and then may there open to 
you that vast and bright Eternity — all vivid with God's 
love — in which an instant vision shall be perfect joy, 
and an immortal labor shall be your immortal rest ! " 

It is recorded that the eloquence of this closing 
passage was indescribable, and when, at the conclu- 
sion, Mr. Beecher trembling from head to foot, and 
with tears, arose, and placing his hand on Dr. Storrs's 
shoulder, kissed him upon the cheek, " the congre- 
gation sat for a moment breathless and enraptured 
at this simple and beautiful action. Then there 
broke forth from them such a burst of applause as 
never before was heard in an ecclesiastical edifice." 

Rev. Dr. Budington was introduced to make the 
closing address, but with perfect good taste excused 
himself saying: " I am satisfied that this service is 
concluded as only God's Spirit could conclude it, 
and as your hearts, beating with mine, would have it 
concluded." Upon this Mr. Beecher said: "We 
will sing then, 'Jesus, Lover of my Soul,' the 
sweetest hymn that ever was written in the English 
language, the deepest, the most imploring, and the 
most comforting." He well knew what it was to hide 
on the bosom of his Saviour, and perhaps he also 
knew that the tempest was very near and that the 
billows of sorrow would soon engulf him. 



378 HENRY WARD CEECHER. 

Friday, October nth, was the closing day. At 
the morning meeting. Rev. Lyman Abbott offered 
prayer and remarks were made by Dr. Edward 
Beecher, Maj. J. B. Merwin, and Rossiter W. Ray- 
mond. There is something pathetic, when we re- 
member what was soon to follow in one sen- 
tence of Mr. Raymond's address. " It affords me 
pleasure to rise and bear testimony to this crowning 
beauty of Plymouth Church, the way in which her 
members stand by one another in times of trouble. 
It does not hurt the music of this jubilee week to 
have a little minor chord in it : and I feel as 
though it was my right and privilege to contribute 
this one element." And Mr. Beecher seems almost 
prophetic: " We are not far from home. We have 
but little time left. Heaven is real. Christ is real. 
God is real. Take heart, brethren. Lift up stalwart 
shoulders under your burdens, and go out again to 
face temptation, and to overcome it. It is but a little 
while before we will turn, as the brethren who have 
gone before us have turned, and look over all the 
way in which God hath led us, and then lift up our 
songs of rejoicing, which shall begin and never 
cease. " 

The concluding evening service was signalized by 
the celebration of the Lord's Supper. Among other 
things Mr. Beecher said: "Although I was a child 
of Christian parents, and had been taught in a cer- 
tain way to respect Christ, it was long after I had 
become a member of the Church, long after I had 
finished my college course, and two years, I think it 
must have been, after I entered the theological semi- 
nary, that I found Christ. He dawned upon me as a 



SUNSHINE BEFORE THE STORM. 379 

Star; but it was such a star as one beholds on a 
stormy sea, in a cloudy night. Taking observations 
I caught it, though it was hid: and it guided me." 

Dr. Edward Beecher and Dr. William M. Taylor, of 
the Broadway Tabernacle, spoke tenderly of what 
Christ had been to them. Rev. Charles M. Morton, 
of the Bethel, Capt. C. C. Duncan, and Rev. Lyman 
Abbott told of what Christ had wrought in their 
lives. Mr. Beecher administered the Communion to 
two thousand believers, and, in closing the service, 
he said among other things, in speaking of the in- 
fluence of the memorable week: "You will cleanse 
your hearts more entirely of every form of uncharit- 
ableness, and unkindness and animosity; you will 
yourselves be disposed, more than ever, to bear one 
another's burdens. " " Let us not forget how large a 
part of the world lies a wilderness, without an occu- 
pant who knows Christ; and let our prayers go up, 
without ceasing, that God will send forth into all the 
earth those same benign influences which have re- 
deemed us. " 

The closing hymn: — 

" When I survey the wondrous cross, 
On which the Prince of Glory died," 

lifted all hearts to the Supreme Sufferer, Whose di- 
vine, amazing love had been the constraining and il- 
luminating power in the twenty-five years of Mr. 
Beecher's almost matchless ministry. 

As the thousands passed out of Plymouth Church 
that night they little realized, or even dreamed, that 
they had been looking upon one who was soon to 
have his Gethsemane and his Calvary. 



CHAPTER XXXVII. 

THE LONG DARKNESS. 

While the next generation will not care to possess 
any full knowledge of the details, which are still fresh 
in many minds, of the events about to be narrated, the 
world will long be eager to know how Mr. Beecher 
bore himself on the " Cross of Slander," and what 
were the final estimates of the fair-minded with re- 
gard to his innocency. 

It is very humiliating for the friends of so great a 
man to find him in such company as the student of 
this part of his career discovers about him. It is 
almost equally humiliating to see how Mr. Beecher's 
noble qualities, carried to excess, were indirectly the 
means of bringing excruciating sorrow upon him and 
wide-wasting suffering upon millions besides. It is 
almost sickening to learn that one who had rendered 
the Church and humanity such services should have 
his name so intimately associated with a scandal 
which for years occupied the attention of the world, 
and did much to lower the moral tone of many inno- 
cent households. 

The late Dr. Peabody, of Harvard University, has 
intimated that even an archangel's plumes would have 
been scorched in the company and situations in 
which Mr. Beecher was led to place himself. That so 



THE LONG DARKNESS. 381 

good a man should have been so humiliated is a mys- 
tery. But that any man should have endured the 
fires which surrounded Mr. Beecher and have come 
forth so radiant, so pure, so self-respecting, and so 
widely trusted and beloved, is a moral miracle, the 
parallel of which it would be difficult to find. 

Good men of characteristics different from Mr. 
Beecher's might never have been involved so seriously 
in the complications which cast a shadow over his 
good name, but probably no other minister in America 
could have lived and maintained his great position 
and influence after having passed through such a 
scandal. In giving a rapid account of this part of 
Mr. Beecher's life, Joseph Cook calls attention to these 
facts: " His chief accusers were wretches or weather- 
vanes beneath contempt. They have dropped from 
public sight. He went through a series of trials and 
came out, on the whole, victoriously. He was tried 
by his Church and acquitted. He was tried by a 
court, and acquitted by a divided jury ; and of the 
three of the twelve jurymen who voted against him, 
two had voted on both sides. He was tried, or was 
threatened with a trial, in another court ; but the 
prosecutor withdrew from the trial when Mr. Beecher 
faced him. His case was examined into by a renowned 
Council which unanimously pronounced entire con- 
fidence in him."* 

Theodore Tilton, the principal accuser of Mr. 
Beecher, was a member of Plymouth Church, as was 
also Mrs. Tilton. This brilliant egotist claimed that 
he owed almost everything to Mr. Beecher. " You 



*'* Boston Monday Lecturs," 1888, p. 146. 



382 HENRY WARD 13EECHER. 

were my minister, teacher, father, brother, friend, 
companion. The debt I owe you I can never repay." 

Through Mr. Beecher's friendly influence Tilton 
became, in 1861, assistant editor of The Independent. 
In 1863 Tilton was given the entire editorial super- 
vision of that paper. In 1865 he became editor-in- 
chief, while Mr. Beecher remained a contributor of 
Star articles. In 1866, after the famous Cleveland let- 
ters, Tilton's attacks upon his old friend were so 
violent tha4; Mr. Beecher withdrew from any connec- 
tion with The Independent. 

Tilton soon began to display his almost unparal- 
leled conceit, and at the same time to ventilate his 
extremely advanced ideas on religious, social, and 
other topics. In 1869, The Christian Union was 
organized and the following year Mr. Beecher took 
control of this paper. In December, 1870, the owner 
of The Independent dismissed Tilton from the editor- 
ship of that paper which had suffered greatly from 
the withdrawal of Mr. Beecher and the immense pros- 
perity of The Christian Union. Tilton believed that 
his dismissal was due to the hostile influence of Mr. 
Beecher. Many stories of Tilton's bad life were 
poured into the ears of the proprietor of The Inde- 
pendent. Out of the business troubles, here faintly 
indicated, came what has been called the " Con- 
spiracy," the purpose of which was to ruin the pas- 
tor of Plymouth Church. 

Tilton, by his follies, had become " bankrupt in 
reputation, in occupation, and in resources." " Find- 
ing his own morality impeached, he adopted the 
peculiar defense of darkly insinuating that Mr. 
Beecher was open to suspicion, and finally formed a 



THE LONG DARKNESS. ^S;^ 

determination to drive him from his pulpit and from 
the city by means of an accusation of some vaguely 
defined offense to Mr. Tilton's own family." 

Mr. Beecher was a familiar visitor at the Tilton 
household, and in July, 1870, when Mrs. Tilton was 
sick, he made his last visit to her before grave troubles 
broke out in the family. In December, 1870, Mr. 
Beecher became aware of Mrs. Tilton's great suffer- 
ing on account of the ill treatment of her husband. 
After an interview with Mrs. Tilton, Mrs. Henry Ward 
Beecher expressed her extreme indignation toward 
Tilton, and declared that " no consideration on earth 
would induce her to remain an hour with a man who 
had treated her with a hundredth part of such insult 
and cruelty." Mr. Beecher strongly inclined to his 
wife's view with regard to the proper steps to be 
taken. That view favored a separation between Mr. 
and Mrs. Tilton, and he sent word to that effect 
through his wife. Mr. Beecher did not know at that 
time that Mr. Tilton had already extorted from his 
wife a confession of excessive affection for her pastor. 
In December, 1870, Mr. Bowen brought to Mr. Beecher 
a letter from Tilton demanding Mr. Beecher's with- 
drawal from the pulpit and from Brooklyn. Mr. 
Beecher read it to Mr. Bowen and said : ''This man 
is crazy. This is sheer insanity." Mr. Bowen asked 
Mr. Beecher's advice as to whether Tilton should be 
retained by him as a chief contributor to T/ie Inde- 
pendefit and as editor of The Bi'ooklyn Utiioti which Mr. 
Bowen controlled. Mr. Bowen said that he had been 
overwhelmed by the stories of Tilton's private life 

1" Life," pp. 52-53. 



384 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

and habits. Under the provocation of Tilton's threat- 
ening letter, and with the knowledge of Tilton's 
domestic cruelties, Mr. Beecher strongly advised a 
severance of Mr. Bowen's connection with Tilton. 
Mr. Beecher believed that his advice precipitated Til- 
ton's downfall. 

Mr. Beecher became very unhappy as he thought 
over Tilton's disaster. He had loved him much as a 
man, and now he was cast forth from his important 
position. His home did not promise him such sym- 
pathy and strength in the time of adversity as men 
thus tried sadly need. Learning what Mr. Beecher 
had done, Tilton proceeded to extort from his wife a 
confession incriminating Mr. Beecher, charging him 
with improper proposals to her. 

After learning of this false confession, Mr. Beecher 
went to see her immediately. She admitted its falsity 
and excused her conduct on the ground that she was 
urged to make this confession by her husband, who 
persuaded her that if she confessed to an improper 
affection for Mr. Beecher, it would be easier for him 
(Tilton) to confess his own misdeeds, and that this 
would be the beginning of a new and better life. Mr. 
Beecher urged her to retract this confession, promis- 
ing that the retraction should not be used to injure 
her husband. He got a pen and paper and she wrote: 
" Wearied by importunity and weakened by sickness, I 
gave a letter inculpating my friend Henry Ward 
Beecher, under assurances that it would remove all 
difficulties between myself and my husband. That 
letter I now revoke. I was persuaded to it, almost 
forced, when I was in a weakened state of mind. I 
regret it and I revoke all its statements. I desire to 



THE LONG DARKNESS. 385 

say explicity that Mr. Beecher has always treated 
me in a manner becoming a Christian and a gentle- 
man." 

Perceiving clearly, and feeling keenly what great 
disasters to himself, his family, his Church, and the 
cause of Christianity would certainly follow a public 
accusation, Mr. Beecher fell into a morbid condition 
of mind. Plainly seeing that the charge, though 
utterly untrue, might lead to most ruinous results, 
his actions during the next four years must be 
explained in large part by his desire " to keep these 
matters out of sight." 

In his distressed state of mind Mr. Francis D. 
Moulton, the *' Mutual Friend " found him, persuaded 
him of Tilton's good character, pictured him as ruined 
in reputation, purse, and prospects, and shattered in 
his family, while Mr. Beecher was overflowing with 
prosperity. He was made to believe that Mrs. Til- 
ton's undue affection for himself was the beginning of 
the trouble. This '' friend " worked upon Mr. Beech- 
er's guilelessness, generosity, and impulsiveness, and 
it was but natural that, under these circumstances, 
such a man as Henry Ward Beecher, magnanimous, 
over-generous, chivalrous toward others, should have 
blamed himself excessively. " The case, as it then 
appeared to my eyes, was strongly against me. My 
old fellow worker had been dispossessed of his emi- 
nent place and influence, and I had counseled it ; his 
family had been well-nigh broken up, and I had 
advised it ; his wife had long been sick and broken 
in health and body, and I, as I fully believed, had 
been the cause of all this wreck by continuing with 
blind heedlessness the friendship which had beguiled 
25 



386 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

her heart, and had roused her husband to a fury of 
jealousy, though not caused by any intentional act of 
mine." *' I had thought myself an old stick, and I 
was amazed and horrified to find this morning glory 
twining about me." * 

In these unhealthy moods of excessive condemna- 
tion, Mr, Beecher said and wrote much about himself 
which it was easy for unscrupulous men to turn dis- 
astrously against him, and which it is still easy for 
unsympathetic and unimaginative men to misinter- 
pret. 

The story of what Mr. Beecher suffered through 
the next four years of silence is most harrowing. It 
is not in the least necessary to recall the confer- 
ences, devices, arguments, and all the details of 
that humiliating record ; Mr. Beecher's perplexities, 
Tilton's pecuniary troubles, his alternating between 
genial affection and scowling threats; his insinuations; 
the starting of rumors; the beginning of his efforts to 
poison the public mind; his eagerness to compile 
"statements"; the terrible accusations which made 
Mr. Beecher look forward to sudden death as a grate- 
ful relief ; the attacks and perhaps blackmailing 
efforts which Mr, Beecher did not understand as 
such; the extorting of money through his generosity; 
the outbreak of the Woodhull story, and finally, in 
June, 1873, when he discovered that Tilton had been 
deceiving him right along, and was supplying the 
public with scandalous rumors, Mr. Beecher's publica- 
tion of a card in the Brooklyn Eagle ^ boldly chal- 
lenging anybody to publish any letters or give any 



* From a conversation with Prof. G. B. Willcox. 



THE LONG DARKNESS. 387 

information concerning him, and stamping as false 
the stories and rumors that had been circulated. 

In 1873, Tilton was formally charged by Plymouth 
Church with being the slanderer of his pastor. He 
replied that he had not been a member of that Church 
for more than four years, and, according to its rules, 
the Church voted to drop his name from the roll. 
Two neighboring and sister Churches, in disapproval 
of this action, called, in March, 1874, an Advisory 
Council. This Council did not approve of the dis- 
posal that Plymouth Church had made of Mr. 
Tilton's case. It also pronounced the action of the 
two sister Churches unwise and hasty, and further- 
more expressed the opinion that Plymouth Church 
should not be read out of fellowship. 

In June, 1874, Tilton published a statement declar- 
ing that Mr. Beecher had committed an offense 
against him which he forbore to name, although, 
changing his tactics, on July 21st, he published an- 
other statement, charging that Mr. Beecher's offense 
had been the gravest possible against his family. " In 
all the stories which he and Moulton had told to 
various friends at different times, and in the state- 
ments which he had prepared, and shown in confi- 
dence, the charge was always 'improper proposals,' 
and the emphatic assertion of his wife's innocence. 
Now he proposed to stake all on one cast of the 
dice. He would bring a suit, and if he could get 
no more help, he would, at least, so his vanity and 
Mr. Beecher's evil wishers assured him, crush Mr. 
Beecher."^ 



Biography," p. 532. 



3^8 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Immediately after Tilton's June statement, Mr. 
Beecher asked six of the most respected men from his 
Church and congregation — Henry W. Sage, Augustus 
Storrs, Henry M. Cleveland, Horace B. Claflin, John 
Winslow, and S. V. White, to make a thorough exam- 
ination of all the evidence in the case, and to commu- 
nicate to the Executive Committee of the Church such 
action as they deemed right and wise. 

In a letter sent to this committee Mr. Beecher said: 
" For four years I have borne and suffered much and 
I will not go a step further. I will be free. I will not 
walk under a rod or yoke. If any man would do me 
a favor, let him tell all he knows now. It is not mine 
to lay down the law of honor as to the use of other 
persons' confidential communications, but in so far as 
my own rights are concerned, there is not a letter nor 
document which I am afraid to have exhibited, and I 
authorize any and call upon any living person to pro- 
duce and bring forth whatever writings they have 
from any source whatsoever." 

" It is time for the sake of decency and public morals 
that this matter should be brought to an end. It is 
an open pool of corruption exhaling deadly vapors." 

" For six weeks the nation has risen and sat down 
upon a scandal. Not a great war or rebellion could 
have more filled the newspapers than this question of 
domestic trouble, magnified a thousand-fold, and, like 
a sore spot in the human body, drawing to itself 
every morbid humor in the blood. Whoever is buried 
with it, it is time that this abomination be buried be- 
low all touch or power of resurrection." ^ 



Biography," pp. 528-529. 



THE LONG DARKNESS. 389 

When we remember all that followed, as well as all 
that which preceded this time, we cannot wonder at 
the more than Herculean efforts which this greatly- 
tried and perplexed man had made to suppress the 
scandal. " That I have grievously erred in judgment 
in this perplexed case, no one is more conscious than 
I am. I chose the wrong path and accepted a disas- 
trous guidance at the beginning, and have indeed 
traveled a rough and ragged edge in my prolonged 
effort to suppress this scandal which has at last spread 
so much disaster through the land, but I cannot admit 
that I erred in desiring to keep these matters out of 
sight. In this respect I appeal to all Christian men to 
judge whether almost any personal sacrifice ought not 
to have been made rather than to suffer the morals of an 
entire community, and especially of the young, to be 
contaminated by the filthy details and scandalous 
falsehoods, daily iterated and magnified, for the grat- 
ification of impure curiosity and the demoralization 
of every child that is old enough to read." ^ 

The committee appointed, although beginning 
their sittings on the 28th of June, did not complete 
their report until the 28th of August. Thirty-six 
witnesses were summoned, most of whom appeared. 
Tilton presented his statement, but after a time he 
withdrew, not liking the cross-examination. Mrs. 
Tilton appeared before the committee, and most 
solemnly denied the charge made by her husband. 
The full statement which Mr. Beecher then made 
brought most grateful and satisfactory relief to a 
multitude of bereaved and sorrowing minds. It 



»" Biography," pp. 518-519. 



390 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

furnished a clear and rational explanation of his 
conduct. 

Among the many letters which cheered him at this 
time was one from President Noah Porter, of Yale 
College, expressing his unabated confidence and 
increasing sympathy. " I have just read your state- 
ment, and am more than satisfied with it. It will be 
a slight thing to say that I believe it to be true. I do 
not read for myself, but for the world at large. I 
believe that it will be accepted as true by all except 
the sons of Belial, and those who have been com- 
mitted against you in decided partisanship."^ 

After carefully reviewing the evidence, the com- 
mittee completely exonerated Mr. Beecher from the 
charges made, finding nothing whatever to impair 
perfect confidence in his Christian character and 
integrity. The blame which may attach to Mr. 
Beecher's method of conduct in this terrible affair 
was also gently touched upon in the committee's 
report. *' If this were a question of error in judg- 
ment on the part of Mr. Beecher, it would be easy to 
criticise, especially in the light of recent events. 
Any such criticism, even to the extent of regrets and 
censure, we are sure no man will join in more 
earnestly than Mr. Beecher himself." 



^ "Biography," p. 532. 



CHAPTER XXXVIII. 

THE SON OF THE RIGHTEOUS DELIVERED. 

At an immense meeting held in Plymouth Church 
on the 28th of August, 1874, a unanimous vote was 
passed adopting the report and conclusions of the 
Committee of Investigation. Mr. Beecher's hour of 
relief has come. For four years he had been tortured 
by miscreants ; he had carried a burden of anxiety 
that would have crushed any other man. It is doubt- 
ful if any recent moral or intellectual phenomenon is 
more remarkable than the prodigious toil which Mr. 
Beecher was able to undergo while passing through 
his years of agony. The first volume of the " Life of 
Christ," the three courses of " Lectures on Preach- 
ing," at Yale in 1872-4, his editorial, platform, and 
pulpit work, attest his mighty force and productive- 
ness, during these years of sorrow, silence, and 
anxiety. 

Though the scandal caused a diminishing of his 
influence in nearly every direction, except with his 
own people and his most enthusiastic friends, his 
pulpit work was perhaps never so great and mar- 
velous as in the three years following the final 
outbreak of the trouble. Those who were with him 
felt that he walked with God. It is true that he had 
new sorrows to bear, almost the hardest which ever 



392 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

come to men — the alienation and hostility of cherished 
friends and brethren, the curtailment of his power for 
good, and every form of personal obloquy. His case was 
peculiar, like himself, and his name was so associated 
with political, personal, and theological controversies 
that public opinion was divided in regard to his 
innocence, as it had always been in regard to his 
wisdom. But he, himself, had " entered the harbor 
of peace.'' 

*■* And what was most singular was that when 
the Church came into an eclipse, I came out of it. I 
had had my time when I was dumb and opened 
not my mouth and was led like a sheep to slaughter- 
But when the terrible trouble came upon the whole 
Church, with its immense suffering, there came to me 
emancipation. God was pleased to uphold me as 
I walked alone and in silence, and afterwards he gave 
me such relief that, during the two or three years in 
which the Church was shrouded with anxiety, I 
was filled with trust and courage and was enabled all 
the time to lift up the Church and carry it hopefully 
along from Sabbath to Sabbath." 

It is probable that a volume of testimonies could be 
compiled from those who heard Mr. Beecher between 
1874 and 1878 as to the wonderful uplifting and peace- 
giving power of his prayers and pulpit utterances. 

He said : " I have rolled off my burden, I am in 
the hands of God, I am certain of salvation and safety 
in God, and I do not give it any lower application, 
but I am hidden in His pavilion, I am surrounded by 
His peace and I have got back through storms and 



** Biography," p. 531. 



THE SON OF THE RIGHTEOUS DELIVERED. 393 

troubles to the simplicity and quiet enjoyment which 
belonged to me many years ago. My heart, my feel- 
ing, and my soul run very quiet, and it is the result 
not so much of any visible and external thing as that 
I am sure that I am surrounded by the hand of my 
God. I live in Him and He lives in me, and He gives 
the promised peace." ^ 

Mr. N. D. Pratt in his reminiscences recalls that in 
1877, 3.t the close of a very successful lecture which 
Mr. Pratt had arranged for him, Mr. Beecher said : 
"You must not lose any more sleep for fear you will 
lose money on me." "I said, ' Mr. Beecher, I have 
never lost any sleep over you except once, on the day 
when Mr. Tilton made his sworn statement I was so 
anxious and troubled that I had no rest and I tossed 
about the livelong night. I was anxious that you 
should make matters entirely clear.' 

" Tears came to his eyes, and he said : ' My friends 
were much more troubled than I was. I was in the 
hands of God; these things are of the past and I wish 
my friends were as little troubled about them now as 
I am.' " 

Tilton and his chosen friend perceived that they 
must " resort to some desperate measures or surrender 
themselves to everlasting infamy." On July 21st, 
1874, Tilton had finally made a definite charge and 
began action against Mr. Beecher in the Brooklyn 
City Court, the trial of which was opened before 
Judge Neilson on the nth of January, 1875. The 
damages were placed at one hundred thousand 
dollars. 



1" Biography," p. 531. 



394 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

It has been truly said that there has been no 
sensation like the Beecher-Tilton trial in this genera- 
tion. For six exciting months it continued. The 
legal talent employed included among others, Morris, 
Beach, and Pryor, for the plaintiff, and Evarts, Porter, 
Tracey, Shearman, and Abbott, for the defendant. 
Some of the scenes of this trial are among the most 
extraordinary in modern annals. Although the tes- 
timony, which covers several thousand pages, added 
but little to what was previously well known, still the 
public interest was greedy and continuous. During 
the trial Mrs. Tilton, debarred from testifying, rose in 
Court and presented a document containing these 
words among others: " For five years past I have 
been the victim of circumstances most cruel and 
unfortunate, struggling from time to time for a place 
only to live honorably and truthfully. Released for 
some months from the will by whose power uncon- 
sciously I criminated myself again and again, I declare 
solemnly before you, without fear of man and by faith 
in God, that I am innocent of the crimes charged 
against me." 

Through that half year of agonizing trial Mrs. 
Beecher was always at her husband's side, and Mr. 
Beecher had the same quiet look, the same uncon- 
strained manner that belonged to him in the lecture- 
room or parlor. On the 24th day of June, the day 
when Mr. Beecher was sixty-two years of age, the 
case was given to the jury, and after nine days of 
striving to reach an agreement, they were discharged. 
There were three votes for the plaintiff and nine for 
the defendant. '* We are informed on the authority 
of one of the jurors that several times they stood 



THE SON OF THE RIGHTEOUS DELIVERED. 395 

eleven to one in the defendant's favor. Once all agreed 
on a verdict for the defendant when a juror unfortu- 
nately remarked that his son had wagered a large sum 
on a verdict for the defendant. This statement split 
the jury at once, and from thence on they remained 
three to nine until they were discharged." ' 

Though the jury and the public were divided over 
the question of Mr. Beecher's innocence, the judge 
and the greatest lawyers on this famous trial appear 
to have been of one mind. Judge Neilson became 
a warm, true friend of Mr. Beecher, and eight years 
after the trial he presided at a meeting in the Brook- 
lyn Academy of Music, at which testimonials of 
respect and love were given Mr. Beecher on his 
seventieth birthday. Mr. William A. Beach, the lead- 
ing counsel for Tilton, who was predisposed to think 
Mr. Beecher guilty, afterwards frequently pronounced 
him innocent. "I had not been four days on the 
trial before I was confident that he was innocent." His 
appearance and utterance, when he asserted his 
innocence on the witness-stand, were the most sublime 
and inspiring exhibition of the majesty of human 
nature that he ever beheld. He could not see how 
one could resist that solemn avowal. *' I felt and feel 
now," said he, " that we were a pack of hounds try- 
ing in vain to drag down a noble man." ^ 

Rev. Dr. Allon, of London, one of the most careful 
and scholarly of English preachers, who had been 
greatly puzzled by some of the complications in this 



> '* Biography," p. 533. 

^ John D. Parsons, Lajo Journal, Albany, N. Y., March 19, 1887; 



quoted in "Patriotic Addresses, * p. 151. 



396 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

difficult affair, when the civil trial of Mr. Beecher 
began, called to him several of his best parishioners, 
some of whom were eminent lawyers, and they agreed 
that each should read most carefully every part of 
the case and gain an accurate understanding of the 
whole. After the case was ended " these experts 
came together, and, without discussion, gave their 
individual ballots; the result being unanimous that 
there was no evidence to sustain the charge of the 
plaintiff." ' 

Perhaps the simplest way out of the difficulties 
which surround this case is a true, full, sympathetic 
understanding of Mr. Beecher's remarkably frank, 
emotional, impulsive, generous, guileless tempera- 
ment and his occasional strange and morbid moods. 
His sister, Mrs. Stowe, wrote to George Eliot : 
" My brother is hopelessly generous and confiding. 
His inability to believe evil is simply incredible, and 
so has come all this suffering, ... I, who know 
his purity, honor, and delicacy, know that he has been 
from childhood of an ideal purity — who reverenced 
his conscience as his king, whose glory was redressing 
human wrongs, who spoke no slander, no, nor listened 
to it." 

To some these words may seem to have been 
dictated by sisterly affection and partiality. Is it not 
likely that they are far nearer the truth than the 
interpretations of Mr. Beecher's conduct made by 
men whose temperament was totally different from 
his? 



* From Howard's sketch of Henry Ward Beecher in '* Patriotic 
Addresses," p. 150. 
*" Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe," p. 478-480. 



THE SON OF THE RIGHTEOUS DELIVERED. 397 

Again Mrs. Stowe wrote of him : '• Never have I 
known a nature of such strength and such almost 
childlike innocence. He is of a nature so sweet and 
perfect that, though I have seen him thunderously 
indignant at moments, I never saw him fretful or 
irritable — a man who continually in every little act of 
life is thinking of others; a man that all the children 
of the street run after, and that every sorrowing, 
weak, and distressed person looks to as a natural 
helper. In all this long history there has been no 
circumstance of his relation to any woman that 
has not been worthy of himself — pure, delicate, and 
proper — and I know all sides of it and certainly 
should not say this if there were even a misgiving. 
Thank God there is none, and I can read my New 
Testament and feel that by all the beatitudes my 
brother is blessed." * 

Dr. Lyman Abbott, who knew Mr. Beecher well, 
explains why he was so peculiarly liable to mis- 
interpretation. " His opalescent nature, his kaleido- 
scopic moods, his profound intellectual and spiritual 
insight, his impatience of the mere mechanics and 
formularies of religion which are of larger moment 
than he realizes, because the weak need props which 
the strong do not need, his intensely emotional nature 
and his utter disregard of his own reputation, make 
him often an enigma to his friends and always an 
easy subject for the misrepresentation of envy, malice, 
and uncharitableness." ^ 

It is known to-day that many of those who were 



* " Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe," p. 480. 

* " Life of Henry Ward Beecher," Preface, p. vii. 



398 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

generally deemed firm believers in Mr. Beecher's 
guilt and whose unfriendliness told so powerfully 
against him in the public mind, have acknowledged 
that they were not believers in his guilt, but that they 
had been greatly disappointed in Mr. Beecher, whom 
they had formerly loved and trusted, after discovering 
in him such serious defects of character. But it 
should be remembered, when we think of Mr. 
Beecher's four years of silence, that he had put him- 
self under wrong and misleading guidance ; and it 
should be remembered also what Avas the peculiar 
character of that brilliant personage whose vanity, 
jealousy, and cruel selfishness he sought to control, 
and what were the grave and momentous interests 
involved. Few men have ever been tried by circum- 
stances so singular and terrible, in the midst of such 
a queer lot of hyperemotional and crack-brained 
people. 

Mr. Beecher was a wise student of human nature in 
general and sometimes a poor judge of human nature 
in particular. It can hardly be said that he made 
a bad choice of friends; it is more accurate to say 
that bad friends came to him as an infliction from a 
mysterious Providence. If, in 1872, Mr. Beecher had 
not been bound in honor to be silent, and had 
accepted Dr. Storrs's kindly and generous offer of 
service, perhaps, with the aid of that powerful and 
masterly friend, he might have brought even Tilton 
to his senses, and certainly he would have gone to his 
great trial with an ampler reinforcement of public 
confidence behind him. 



CHAPTER XXXIX. 

A MULTITUDE OF COUNSELORS. 

The history of the noblest leaders in the Christian 
Church has been, in all ages, a history of hate and 
defamation. From the time of Origen to that of 
John Wesley a malignant personal element has often 
been commingled with the odium theologicum and the 
odium ecclesiasticum. Everybody remembers what 
Hooker eloquently wrote of Athanasius, alone against 
the world, when the hearts of his best friends had 
been stolen from him, and there appeared to be no 
friends left, "excepting God and death, the one the 
defender of his innocency, the other the finisher of 
his troubles." Henry Ward Beecher was surrounded 
by an army of friends, but the warfare which he was 
forced to wage for his good name and position was 
prolonged and stubborn. 

After the summer vacation of 1875, M^- Beecher 
returned to his pulpit to discover that his troubles 
had not ended. Doubt and hostility, in all the vari- 
ous forms which he had excited, appeared to be com- 
bined in a persistent attempt against him and his 
Church. His enemies had not given over their efforts 
to break him down. He said of himself: " I have not 
been hunted as an eagle is hunted, I have not been 
pursued as a lion is pursued, I have not been pursued 
even as wolves and foxes. I have been pursued as if 
I were a maggot in a rotten corpse. And do you sup- 



400 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

pose that it is in human nature, through months and 
through years, not to feel it ? But if it please God, 
who has enabled me to go through the desert and 
Red Sea, that I should go on, God is my judge that 
I am both willing and I am able to go on again for 
another five years; for I can do all things. Christ 
strengthens me, and the life that I now live in the 
flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me 
never so much as now." 

To those who remember accurately that time, the 
words of Thomas G. Shearman will scarcely seem 
exaggerated, certainly not in what he says of the loy- 
alty of Mr. Beecher's friends: ^' Never before in the 
history of this country — never, indeed, in the history 
of the world — were such gigantic efforts put forth to 
crush any merely private citizen. Never was an en- 
tire Nation so absorbed in the fate of such a man. 
Never did such an army of devoted friends rally to 
his support." ^ 

No eulogy is bright enough for the chivalrous loy- 
alty, the enthusiasm, the self-sacrifice, the identifica- 
tion of their interests with his, which characterized 
the noble army of Mr. Beecher's friends, and espe- 
cially his own people. This man had become a part 
of themselves. They had gone through a horror of 
great darkness on his account, and some of them were 
still in the shadow. " How many a lone woman," 
said President Porter, '' in poverty and distress, as she 
read what the papers reported, has perhaps taken 
down the soiled and tear-spotted bundle of the Ply- 
mouth Pulpit, which had become like a song in her 



'Henry Ward Beecher " Memorial Service," p. 37, 



A MULTITUDE OF COUNSELORS. 40I 

pilgrimage, and felt that she must consign it to the 
fire, and give up her faith in man, and possibly all her 
faith in God." 

On the part of many thousands, unknown to Mr. 
Beecher, to whom his words and example of Chris- 
tian courage and self-sacrifice had been comfort and 
help, it was exceedingly painful that his name should 
be kicked like a football about the streets, placarded 
in places of public resort, associated with vilest insinu- 
ations. The wounds that their spirit suffered made 
one of the tragedies of that time. 

A vast deal of trouble was occasioned to Plymouth 
Church by a few members who did not attend the 
services and who threatened to call councils if their 
names were dropped from the Church roll. So much 
annoyance, nursed and augmented by secular and 
religous journals, sprang from these causes that 
Plymouth Church, early in 1876, summoned a 
National Advisory Council, extending invitations to 
one hundred and seventy-two Churches and to twen- 
ty-eight eminent ministers who had no pastoral 
charge. Finding its good name called into question 
on account of the principles and rules which it had 
long followed in the regulation of its own affairs, 
finding itself under very trying circumstances, the 
Church submitted to a great Council a series of ques- 
tions which covered all the points under discussion. 
Plymouth Church in its troubles said to over one 
hundred and seventy Churches, " Come and help us 
with your counsel," and they came, three-fourths of 
the Churches invited being represented. Half of the 
declining Churches were in the midst of revivals and 
could ill spare their pastors, or the pastors were pre- 
26 



402 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

vented from sickness or otherwise from going to 
Brooklyn. 

At a Church prayer-meeting held just before the 
Council met, Mr. Beecher gave his people a most wise 
and tender address, breathing his affection for them, 
but full of admonition lest their personal sympathy 
for him in his trials should in any way deflect their 
intelligent judgment, and partly lest any demonstra- 
tion on their part in the open meetings of the Coun- 
cil should exert any influence, or be supposed to 
exert any influence, over those who sat in judgment. 
He told them that their business as a Church was not 
to take care of him but to forward the work of the 
Divine Master. He said: " This Church has for years 
been called to go through deep waters. ... I 
know that I have your love and sympathy and I know 
that I am prayed for by you — that suffices me; but 
on your part, it will be very hard for you to suffer 
this human feeling toward an individual to fill such a 
a place in your hearts as that it may be said to fill 
your experience. You are a Church of Christ set on 
a hill and you cannot be hid; and your business here 
is to manifest Jesus Christ to the world in such a way as 
to win them to a nobler life." ^ 

It was on the 15th of February, 1876, that the 
Advisory Council assembled in Plymouth Church. 
It consisted of two hundred and thirty-seven mem- 
bers, the largest Congregational Council ever assem- 
bled by one Church in America. It was truly national 
in character, its members hailing all the way from 
Maine to Kansas and from Albany to Washington. 



^ " Biography," pp. 539-540. 



A MULTITUDE OF COUNSELORS. 403 

It represented all phases of opinion on what is known 
as the *' personal question," from absolute faith, 
through all the degrees of doubt, to absolute distrust. 
One minister asserted that there were seventy-five 
members of the Council who at the beginning believed 
in Mr. Beecher's guilt. At the end the Convention 
was unanimous that he had every right to be 
regarded as an innocent and much-persecuted man. 

The veteran of Congregationalism, one of the 
famous men of the Republic, Dr. Leonard Bacon, of 
New Haven, was chosen Moderator of the Council, 
and ex-Governor Dingley, of Maine, and Gen. E. N. 
Bates, of Springfield, 111., were elected Assistant 
Moderators. 

In his address of welcome Mr. Beecher said, among 
other things: " You come into an atmosphere of 
prayer. Your coming in a thousand households has 
been the theme of morning and evening supplication. 
You have been remembered before God, and in all 
the sessions you will be by devout men and women, 
by a great multitude who have power with God; and 
we have reason to believe that your staying here will 
be not alone for our benefit, but for your own 
spiritual edification, and that watering, you will your- 
self be watered. We regret that we were obliged to 
call you away; but we believe in the Holy Ghost; we 
believe in the presence of the Saviour; we believe 
that it is possible for God to so pour out His spirit 
upon you in your sessions here that you will be better 
qualified to go home and labor in revivals than you 
were even before you came here."^ 



'" Proceedings of the Advisory Council," pp. 11 and 12. 



404 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

No man can be said to have been the leader in this 
important Council, yet a few names deserve to be 
singled out from the rest — the Moderator, Dr. Bacon, 
full of energy in his seventy-fourth year, eminent for 
his ability and his frankness; the venerable Dr. J. M. 
Sturtevant, President of Illinois College; Deacon 
Samuel Holmes, a great giver to Western institutions; 
Rev. Dr. Warren, of Lewiston, Me.; Drs. Paine and 
Talcott, from Bangor Seminary; Judge Currier, of 
St. Louis; Justice Brewer, of the Supreme Court of 
Kansas ; President Strong, of Carleton College, 
Minnesota; Rev. D. O. Mears, of Cambridge; Dr. 
Wellman, of Maiden, Mass.; Dr. Edward Strong and 
Deacon S. P. Capen, of Boston; Dr. F. A. Noble, of 
New Haven; Dr. E. P. Parker, of Hartford; Rev. G. 
B. Willcox, of Stamford; Dr. Wolcott, of Cleveland; 
President Fairchild, of Oberlin. Besides these, one 
of the most judicious and influential minds in the 
Council w^as that of Prof. Timothy Dwight, of Yale 
Theological Seminary, while President Porter, of Yale 
College, one of the most accomplished of scholars and 
chivalrous of Christian gentlemen, gave time, which 
he could ill afford to withdraw from his work, to the 
deliberations of that notable meeting. 

The Council remained in session nine days, and Mr. 
Beecher and his Church were subjected to every sort 
of searching examination. It is doubtful if ever in 
his life the moral and intellectual greatness of Mr. 
Beecher was more conspicuously illustrated. It was 
clarifying to many clouded minds to come into con- 
tact with this much misrepresented man whose name 
had been connected with all sorts of obloquy and 
whose life had been slandered by all sorts of malig- 



A MULTITUDE OF COUNSELORS. 405 

nant innuendo. The loyalty, chivalry, great-hearted- 
ness, and unanimity of Plymouth Church were made 
apparent and also its determination to know all the 
truth about its pastor. In a most tender and eloquent 
address before the Council, Mr. Rossiter W. Raymond 
described the spirit of its members, not only their 
love for Mr. Beecher and enthusiasm for him, but 
their exaltation of duty to Christ, of purity in the 
Church, of self-forgetting devotion to truth, over all 
personal considerations, and above all, their un- 
bounded affection toward their pastor. They had 
searched diligently for the worst that could be known 
against him. It is "because our inquiries have con- 
firmed our knowledge of the man that we have felt it 
a Christian duty to be loyal to Christ in the person of 
His faithful and persecuted servant. Nor have we 
even dreamed of such a thing as retaining in a place 
of sacred responsibility, merely on the ground of pre- 
tense of forgiveness, one who' had proved himself 
weak and wicked. The doctrine that a tearful crimi- 
ual should be invited to continue in a position that he 
has shown himself absolutely unfit to fill, that his 
crime should be concealed, that the innocent and pure 
should be undeservedly exposed to intimacy with 
him — is a monstrous and foul absurdity which we do 
not believe in, and which no sane person seriously 
admits, and which no person now a member of this 
Church in good standing ever pretended to hold," ^ 

The men who composed the Council manifested 
from the beginning to the end a most prayerful, 
devoted, and earnest spirit, the members feeling that 



1 «« 



Proceedings of the Advisory Council," p. 62. 



4o6 . HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

the interests not only of Plymouth Church, hut of 
every Christian household in the land were in their 
keeping. Dr. Henry M. Storrs, during the half-hour 
prayer-meeting before the first morning session, 
spoke most feelingly of the deep anxiety of his heart. 
As the Secretary of one of the great missionary socie- 
ties, he had seen all the great boards of Christian 
work and all the Churches in the land crippled and 
rent by a foul and troublesome scandal. It was the 
earnest prayer of all that the Council might do some- 
thing to restore peace in the American Zion. 

Though the sessions were prolonged beyond expec- 
tation, and though urgent parish work was pleading 
for renewed labor, and many business men were sac- 
rificing large interests by absence, nevertheless, only 
three out of the two hundred and thirty-seven members 
asked to be relieved that they might go home. The 
members were united in the determination to get at 
and bring out the whole truth, hurt where it would. 
Equally manifest was their independent spirit. 
Rumors were afloat that the body was managed by 
Plymouth Church and its pastor, but not only was no 
such effort made, but it was scrupulously avoided and 
discountenanced in every way. Rev. Dr. Wellman 
said in effect: "Beecher is the last man in the world 
to manage anybody. He managed the Council as the 
man who fell among the thieves managed the Good 
Samaritan who came to bind up his wounds." 

Five days were given to the hearing of statements 
bearing on the work and practice of Plymouth Church. 
The questions of the letter-missive were put into the 
hands of six committees of seven each. The first 
conviction reached by the Council was that the news- 



A MULTITUDE OF COUNSELORS. 407 

papers sometimes made mistakes. Such had been 
the public greed for items concerning Plymouth 
Church and its pastor that news had been manufac- 
tured by the wholesale, and furthermore such a com- 
bination of hostile forces had beset Plymouth Church 
that much of the information which came to the peo- 
ple had been twisted and tainted, and had Mr. Beecher 
attempted to correct the misstatements that had gone 
forth he would certainly have been in his grave long 
before. 

The misrepresentations continued while the Council 
was in session. One member counted eight mis- 
statements in a brief editorial in a New England 
newspaper. The members knew that mistakes, though 
unavoidable, were doing great mischief. Mr. Beecher 
had said in a Friday-night talk: "When Plymouth 
Church is attacked she shows her flag," but the read- 
ers of the Boston newspapers next morning saw the 
tremendous statement, *' when Plymouth Church is 
attacked she shows her fangs," and great Christian 
journals rebuked Mr. Beecher for such intemperate 
language ! 

It was plain from the first that the committee of 
Plymouth Church were anxious to have the Council 
search as deeply and closely as possible into its affairs. 
The most personal, and almost impudent, questions 
were welcomed and frankly answered. A careful 
study of the men who surrounded Mr. Beecher, such 
men as Professor R. W. Raymond, Thomas G. Shear- 
man, Dr. Edward Beecher, Rev. Mr. Halliday, Mr. 
Tilney, John T. Howard, S. V. White, Mr. Sage, Mr. 
Claflin, Mr.Winslow, and others, led tlie Council to the 
judgment which Dr. Wellman expressed when he 



4o8 • HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

declared them to be able men, men not to be managed 
and men who would not have an impure pastor if 
they knew it. 

The examination of Mr. Beecher continued through 
several days, and it is difficult to conceive of a more 
difficult testing of a man's moral temper and mental 
capacities than he endured. It was painful to many 
members of the Council, but to him it gave relief. He 
laid bare his heart before his brethren and they knew 
that, however strong and cheerful that heart had been 
at times, it had borne great burdens, and had been 
rent with more sorrows than there were daggers in 
the mantle of Caesar. 

Many who had been strangers to Mr. Beecher saw 
things in a clearer atmosphere. As one said, " We 
must see a man and hear him tell his own story to 
understand him." After one of Mr. Beecher's most 
searching examinations, a professor in Andover The- 
ological Seminary who was present turned to a friend 
and exclaimed, "Who can think for a moment of 
that man being guilty?" 

These, of course, were impressions merely, but im- 
pressions in the matter of character, after one has for 
a long time been in the presence of another, are cer- 
tainly of more value than gossip and rumor and 
stealthy innuendo. Benjamin Franklin, one of the 
wisest heads ever set on American shoulders, wrote: 
" Truth and sincerity have a certain distinguishing 
natural luster about them which can never be per- 
fectly counterfeited; they are like fire and flame that 
cannot be painted." 

From the very constitution of Mr. Beecher's nature, 
as both his friends and enemies declared, he was the 



A MULTITUDE OF COUNSELORS. 409 

weakest of all men whenever he had, in his own 
thought even, injured another. He resorted of neces- 
sity to excessive and exaggerated self-condemnation, 
something which colder and less generous natures 
could hardly understand any more than some men 
can see why the Apostle Paul should have stigma- 
tized himself as the chief of sinners. Many people 
had blamed Mr. Beecher for the words of earnest 
reproof and indignation which he had spoken con- 
cerning two neighboring clergymen believed to be 
unfriendly. It was an unusual thing for Mr. Beecher 
to err after this fashion, but he blamed himself for 
his intemperate words far more than his friends did, 
and that, too, in a most public manner at the closing 
session of the Council. Conscious of committing an 
offense, even in a minor matter, Mr. Beecher was all 
weakness and self-reproach. But carrying such a 
burden of guilt and of infamy, as some good people 
imagined he carried through all those years, and as 
the rabble and lewd multitude would be glad to be- 
lieve that he did, Mr. Beecher's nature would have 
been crushed into abject impotence. 

Mr. R. W. Raymond, who knew Mr. Beecher inti- 
mately, said of him, " He could not dissemble ; he 
could not give force or expression to a feeling which 
v/as not v/ith equal force dominant within him"; and 
Mr. John R. Howard has written: " To prevaricate, 
to give a shifty, double-sensed answer, was something 
that in forty years of acquaintance and twenty years 
of close personal, literary, and business association 
with him as his publisher, I never knew him to do, 
nor do I believe that it was possible for him. He 
could be silent — no man more utterly so; and at 



4IO HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

times, when pursued by questions which he did not 
wish to answer, he would pass into silence not only, 
but into an impassibility of countenance that gave no 
more sign of understanding or response than the face 
of a sphinx. When he spoke at all, in public or in 
private, he spoke the truth as it was given him to see 
the truth." 

This brave frankness, this simplicity and sincerity 
of Mr. Beecher's nature, and the fact that he courted 
every possible investigation, became early apparent 
to the members of the Council. '' I should like to 
know how much longer a man need be at the focus 
of a solar microscope, with all the sun in the 
heavens concentrated upon him for six months and 
everything that could be raked, from the North Pole 
to the South Pole, and round the earth forty times 
circuited, raked up and brought in, and be willing to 
have it raked up and brought in again? How much 
longer does a man want to have his willingness to 
have the truth come out vindicated? If there is any 
man on earth that has anything to say, that he wants 
to say — if there is any man on earth that has any- 
thing to say to my detriment, I here now challenge 
him to say it. I go further than that, if there be any 
angel of God, semi-prescient and omniscient, I chal- 
lenge him to say aught. I go beyond that, and in 
the name of our common Redeemer and before Him 
who shall judge you and me, I challenge the truth 
from God Himself." 

It is doubtful if any rational man, who had any 
sympathetic knowledge of Mr. Beecher, could have 
long believed that, bearing tne unspeakable guilt 
which his enemies charged upon him, he could have 



A MULTITUDE OF COUNSELORS. 4II 

done the work which fell to his lot in the time 
immediately preceding the Advisory Council, in some 
respects the best work of his life. For two years he 
had faced and defied his accusers and had been full 
of faith and cheer while the storm of obloquy was 
fiercest, keeping at his work with unflagging fidelity, 
leading souls to Christ and gaining from wife, sons, 
daughters, brothers, sisters, and all who were nearest 
to his life, a redoubled trust, reverence, and affection. 

The Council was soon satisfied that Mr. Beecher 
and Plymouth Church were afraid of no investiga- 
tion and that they courted the most searching exam- 
ination and that they believed that for years they had 
had it. Probably no other Church and minister since 
time began ever had all their affairs o widely talked 
over. It is a moral miracle that, with a score of 
reporters in every prayer-meeting, Plymouth Church 
had not been disintegrated. The evident plan of the 
enemies of that Church, who owned a great deal of 
capital in New York newspapers, had been to weary 
out the defenders of truth and innocency. The result, 
however, was to crystalize the membership in a firmer 
loyalty. A summer of spiritual fruitfulness had been 
theirs in all this winter of trouble, and the witness of 
God's spirit had never been wanting. 

There were few things in Mr. Beecher's investigation 
before the Council that created a deeper impression 
than the words in which he spoke of his independ- 
ence of human judgment and weariness of men and 
their sinful affairs. " I do not care — as long as God 
knows and my mother — how it is. 1 have come to 
about the state of mind that I do not care for you or 
anybody else. Well, you know that it is not so; that 



412 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

I do care and I don't, and I do again and then I don't 
— just as I happen to feel. I am tired of you, I am 
tired of the world; I am tired of men that make news- 
papers and men that read them. I am tired of a com- 
munity that has not a particle of moral reaction; I 
am tired of an age that will permit the newspapers to 
be flooded and to make themselves a common sewer 
of filth and scandal. I am tired of a community that 
can read them, and read them, and read them, with- 
out revolting. I am tired of waiting for an honest 
man that shall stand up at last and say: ' In the name 
of honor and manhood, this is outrageous.' And yet 
I am going to bear it, and I am going on preaching, 
and I am going to preach here. When I am shut up 
here, I do not know where I will preach; I do not 
believe that I shall live long after I have stopped 
preaching. ... I am intrusted with the tidings 
of salvation to dying men, and the first wish of my 
heart is not my good name or my reputation, dear as 
they are to me for my children's sake and for the 
sake of my family. After all, there is a Name that is 
better to me than mine, there is a Name above every 
other name — for my trouble has brought me very 
near to it and the glory of Christ. God's glory and 
God's delicacy and sweetness and love were never 
made so apparent to me as since I have felt the need 
of them in other folks." 

The result of the Council was announced on the 
24th day of February. Plymouth Church was sus- 
tained on the points in controversy, and the Council 
said: "We hold the pastor of this Church, as we and 
all others are bound to hold him, innocent of the 
charges reported against him until substantiated by 



A MULTITUDE OF COUNSELORS. 413 

proof." In view of the fact that the pastor had so 
earnestly demanded that his accusers be brought to 
face him, and had invited any further investigation 
which the Council thought desirable, for the sake of 
the peace and prosperity of the Churches and to pro- 
tect Plymouth Church from further vexatious pro- 
ceedings, the Council advised the Church to accept 
and empower a commission of five members, to be 
selected by a committee of three, from a list of 
twenty eminent and judicious men, the duty of which 
commission should be to receive and examine all 
charges against the pastor which they might regard 
as not already tried. The commission was appointed, 
but no charges were preferred, although they waited 
a year. 

The result of this historic Council was that the 
backbone of the opposition to Mr. Beecher was 
broken. It did much to bring about a quieter con- 
dition, and, though fierce discussions followed in the 
newspapers, it aided powerfully in bringing in the 
time, which so many prayed for, when, throughout 
the land, Ephraim did not envy Judah nor Judah vex 
Ephraim. 



CHAPTER XL. 



THE SHADOW LESSENING. 



What remains of Mr. Beecher's life does not need 
to be told at length. The pulpit thunderer had 
accomplished his best and greatest work. The suffer- 
ing disciple of Christ had borne his heaviest agony. 
Excitement and events of no little moment were yet 
to follow. For ten years Mr. Beecher was to continue 
his many-sided labors. His name was always to be 
prominent before the English-speaking world. The 
theological changes which he underwent were to 
draw down upon him renewed hostility, suspicion, 
and distrust. Many of his strongest friends were to 
contemplate with bitter resentment his abandonment 
of the Republican party in 1884. 

But his good name had been vindicated; his place 
in the hearts of his own people and of millions of 
Americans was secure. Even the changes, theological 
and political, which occurred in his later life, widened 
his large constituency. His summer in England in 
1886 was to reveal how warm a place he had in the 
regard of many Englishmen. His courage, his kind- 
ness and all the grand elements of his character 
became more and more apparent as animosities died 
away, and the American people contemplated the 
brave and toilsome old age of one who had rendered 
incalcuable services to his country. 



THE SHADOW LESSENING. 415 

With the close of the Advisory Council in 1876 
began the last epoch in Mr. Beecher's career. Had 
he died six years earlier his sun would have set in 
greater splendor. It was not given to him, as to 
Lincoln, to pass away at the supreme moment of his 
life, but probably fifty years hence his fame will be 
brighter, and the estimate of his character higher, on 
account of the temporary eclipse which darkened his 
later years. He who belonged to the glorious company 
of the Apostles, and the goodly fellowship of the 
Prophets, achieved the rarer and more enduring 
renown which by human and Divine right belongs to 
the noble army of the Martyrs. 

There is something pathetic in the trials of these 
later years. Mr. N. D. Pratt in his reminiscences, 
after having expressed the opinion that Mr. Beecher 
seemed to him " to have preached the truest Gospel, 
to have shown the truest Christian spirit, to have 
lived the best Christian life of any of the great 
divines or saints in any age," adds these words: 
" Persecuted in a manner that would have cast down 
any other preacher who ever lived, he endured all, 
and before his death, saw public opinion turn more 
and more toward him, public confidence restored, and 
friends returned by the thousands. He told me of 
the countless letters that came to him from every 
quarter, from all over the globe. To him the great 
sorrow of the great disaster that overtook him, was 
the lessening of his usefulness. He said to me once: 
' I was not aware of it — but it came to me during the 
first years of the great sorrow, that I had been the 
strongest man of the Nation, and that, from influences 
beyond my control, I was shorn of my strength and 



4l6 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

must live to the end of my days under a cloud. But 
I shall still do my duty until God takes me.' " ^ 

Finding himself heavily in debt after the close of 
the trial, Mr. Beecher enlarged and prolonged his 
annual lecturing tours, extending them into the 
South and Southwest, and as far as the Pacific Coast. 
His generous people had raised his salary to a hun- 
dred thousand dollars during the year of the trial, 
thus giving the most tangible and powerful evidence 
of their unshaken confidence and affectionate enthu- 
siasm, but even this had not saved him from debt in 
that year of enormous expenses. Mr. James B. Pond, 
who managed Mr. Beecher's lecturing tours for 
fifteen years, reports that he delivered on an average 
one hundred and fifty lectures a year, and that dur- 
ing some seasons he lectured upwards of two hundred 
and fifty times, besides preaching every Sunday. On 
one trip he delivered a course of nine lectures in San 
Francisco, and although his opinions on the Chinese 
question were sharply antagonized, it is said that the 
proceeds of the last lecture were four thousand two 
hundred dollars. "^ 

Mr. Beecher's lecturing had always some of the 
aims and qualities of his preaching, but superadded 
to all previous motives for engaging in this kind of 
toil, there was, in the years immediately following the 
Advisory Council, an earnest purpose to regain some 
of his lost prestige with the American people. His 
friends argued that his presence and words would 
help to scatter the clouds wherever he went, and so 
it proved in New England, in the far West, and even 



^ " Unpublished Reminiscences." ^ " Life," p 152. 



THE SHADOW LESSENING. 417 

in the South. After Mr. Beecher's death, his lecture- 
agent wrote: " Excepting only Arizona and New 
Mexico, there was not a State or Territory in the 
Union in which we had not traveled together. In 
sunshine and in storm; by night, by day, by every 
conceivable mode of travel; on steamboats and row- 
boats, by stage, and on the backs of mules, I had 
journeyed by his side. I was with him in the days of 
1876-8, the time of his deepest sorrow, when he was 
reviled and spit upon. I saw the majestic courage 
with which he passed through gaping crowds at rail- 
road stations and at the entrances of hotels and pub- 
lic halls — a courage I had not conceived mere human- 
ity could possess. I have looked upon him when I 
felt that I would give my poor life a thousand times 
could that sacrifice alleviate the mental sufferings 
that I knew he was undergoing." 

The testimonies are numerous to the patience and 
fortitude manifested by Mr. Beecher during these 
years. In 1876 he said: " I do not know the man or 
woman on the face of the earth for whom I cannot 
utter a prayer that shall be congenial with Christ's 
sweetest moods. I do not know one persop in this 
Nation for whom my heart does not go out, for whom 
I do not feel sympathy, and for whom I would not 
sacrifice something, if the opportunity were given."* 

"Often," says Mr. Pond, "I have seen him, on our 
entering a strange town, hooted at by the swarming 
crowd, and greeted with indecent salutations. On 
such occasions he would pass on, seemingly unmoved, 
to his hotel, and remain there until the hour for his 



* From Mr. T. J. EUinwood's " Unpublished Reminiscences.** 
27 



41 8 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

public appearance; then, confronted by great throngs 
he would lift up his voice, always for humanity and 
godliness. He always saw and seized his opportu- 
nity to speak to the whole great people, and when he 
had spoken, the assembly would linger and draw near 
to greet the man whom they had so lately despised. 
How often I have seen the public attitude change 
toward him in a town to which he had come but the 
day before. Thus he went from city to city, making 
advocates of all who heard or met him." ^ 

Thus, with all his deep sorrow, there was the joy 
that the people were coming back to him. " On his 
return from lecturing tours, in his later years, when 
he set himself to regain lost ground and to conquer 
prejudice, he would relate his triumphs with the 
frank exultation of a boy. But none of these things 
made him vain or conceited."'* 

Mr. Beecher's letters home, giving hasty sketches 
of his lectures in Boston, St. Paul, Madison, Louis- 
ville, Pittsburgh, and other cities, recalled the vast 
audiences, the great applause, the receptions at min- 
isters' meetings, the tears, the greetings, and hand- 
shakings; the change in public sentiment, the kind- 
ness of old enemies, the affection of the people; 
honors from legislatures, and every token of increas- 
ing trust and love. 

'' I have felt, time and again, that that which I have 
had of trouble I have bought at a cheap rate; the 
trouble has been but a small price to pay for a 
lodgment in the hearts of the best men, the best 



' ' A Summer in England wiili Henry Ward Beecher," p. 5. 

■^ Thomas G. Shearman's Address, "A Memorial Service," p. 19. 



THE SHADOW LESSENING. 419 

women, and the children. I have found that those 
whose love is deepest and warmest represent families 
who look at everything in the world from the stand- 
point of the household — who judge of preaching, 
of ethics, and of methods by the relation which they 
bear to the bringing up of the young, and to the 
founding and maintaining of Christian homes. That 
part of the community who live in the household and 
honor it, I had almost said, were universally my most 
dear and cordial friends." ^ 



" Biography," pp. 566-567. 



CHAPTER XLI. 

NEW LIGHT ON OLD PROBLEMS. 

Freed more and more from the burden which had 
weighed down his heart, Mr. Beecher's mind was 
eagerly turned to giving a larger and fuller state- 
ment of his developing religious opinions. As a life- 
long student of science, he had become, with Presi- 
dent McCosh, Professors Dana, Le Conte, and Gray, 
with Mivart, Wallace, and the Duke of Argyle, a con- 
vert to the theory of evolution. The adoption of this 
theory powerfully affected his thinking and teaching. 
It hastened forward certain tendencies of his mind 
which had long been apparent. The new views 
were, of course, denounced as heresies; and, beyond 
anything else, his famous sermon on future punish- 
ment, called " The Background of Mystery," greatly 
disturbed many conservative theologians. 

What Mr. Beecher spoke from his pulpit came to 
m^ny people in America with such a large mixture of 
misstatement and exaggeration that, as usual, it 
called forth more criticism than it deserved. If his 
sermons on Evolution and Religion had come to the 
thinking public, first of all in the pages of a book, as 
they finally did in 1885, the distrust and disturbance 
would not have been so marked and profound. The 



NEW LIGHT ON OLD PROBLEMS. 421 

volume on Evolution and Religion is a study of truth 
made, it would seem, like most of Mr. Beecher's 
studies, under the greatest emotional excitement. He 
sees things by flashes, and, though he may see further 
in certain directions than other men, how much that 
he utters appears to us distorted and inexact ! At 
times he excites more than he instructs, but his 
remarkable prophetic character is apparent in its 
pages. Much of the time he speaks like a Hebrew 
seer or poet, uttering his fervent thoughts when 
stirred by the deepest emotions. Nothing is seen by 
him in the white light of pure intellect. It is rosy or 
rainbow light everywhere. As we read him, we seem 
to ourselves examining flowers, specimens, and 
elements in a room illuminated by many-colored 
windows. It is like bringing a laboratory into a 
Gothic cathedral. To the theological student the 
effects are sometimes bizarre. We feel that a most 
wonderful mind and heart are at work, but we also 
sometimes feel that we are learning quite as much of 
Mr. Beecher as we are of Jehovah. 

In October, 1882, he resigned his membership in 
the Congregational Association of Ministers in New 
York and Brooklyn. In withdrawing from his con- 
nection with them, a step which he deemed necessary 
lest his brethren might feel that they were held in 
any measure responsible for his beliefs, he made a 
somewhat elaborate statement of his theological 
opinions. After stating his views negatively, he 
affirmed that he was working on the same lines and 
in the same direction with his teachings of more than 
forty-five years. As his doctrine had been widely 
misrepresented, he touched upon the sources of its 



422 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

misrepresentation. They partly sprang from his own 
impetuous nature, and partly from the way in which 
he had been reported. 

Speaking of his underlying mental philosophy and 
his personal experiences and the history of his early 
preaching, he said: "There are many things that 
are necessary to a system of theology that are not 
necessary to the conversion of men." " I have called 
those things fundamental which were necessary for 
the conviction of sin, for the conversion from sin, for 
the development of faith, for the dominant love of the 
Lord Jesus Christ, and for the building up of a 
Christlike character. That dispenses with a great 
many doctrines that are necessary for a theological 
system or for an ecclesiastical statement." ' 

He then, with some detail, told what he believed of 
the nature of God, of his acceptance of the Trinity, 
of his enthusiastic belief in the Divinity of Christ and 
in the Holy Ghost as one of the persons of the God- 
head. He declared his belief in general and special 
providence, in the efficacy of prayer and in miracles. 
"I wrote in a book when I came to Brooklyn: 'I 
foresee there is to be a period of great unbelief ; now 
I am determined so to preach as to lay a foundation, 
when the flood comes, on which men can build,' and 
I have thus, as it were, been laboring for the Gentiles, 
not for the Jews, in the general drift of my min- 
istry." ' 

He announced his belief in the need of regeneration 
and in the inspiration of the Scriptures as set forth in 
the Westminster Confession of Faith. " The Bible 

1 " Life," p. 493. 5 " Life," p. 498. 



NEW LIGHT ON OLD PROBl EMS. 423 

is a record of the steps of God in revealing Himself 
to man. The inspiration was originally upon the 
generation, upon the race, and then what was gained 
step by step was gathered up as this says, and put 
into writing for the better preservation of it." 

In speaking of the Atonement, he remarked: "I 
am accustomed to say that Christ is in Himself the 
Atonement. That He is set forth in His life, teach- 
ing, suffering, death, resurrection, and heavenly glory, 
as empowered to forgive sin and to transform men 
into a new and nobler life, who know Him and accept 
Him in full and loving trust. He is set forth as one 
prepared and empowered to remit the penalty of 
past sins, and to save them from the dominion of sin. 
It is not necessary to salvation that men should know 
how Christ was prepared to be a Saviour. It is He 
Himself that is to be accepted and not the philosophy 
of His nature or work. I employ the word Christ for 
that which systematic writers call the Atonement."' 

In regard to future punishment he set forth his 
belief that " the Scriptures teach explicitly " that con- 
duct and character in this life produce respectively 
beneficial or detrimental effects both in the life that 
now is and in that which is to come, and that a man 
dying is not in the same condition on the other side 
whether he be bad or whether he be good; but that 
consequences follow and go over the border. He 
believed that the consequences are so large and 
dreadful that every man ought to be deterred from 
venturing upon them. In regard to the continuance 
of punishment beyond the grave he said; "I do not 



* •• Life," pp. 502-503. 



424 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

think we are authorized by the Scriptures to say that 
it is endless in the sense in which we ordinarily em- 
ploy that term." ^ 

In a sermon preached in 1859 his view was different. 
He said: ''I sound the depths of the other world with 
curious inquiries ; but from it comes no echo and no 
answer to my questions. No analogies can grapple 
and bring up from the depths of the darkness of the 
lost world the probable truths. No philosophy has 
line and plummet long enough to sound the depths. 
There remain for us only the few and authoritative 
words of God. It is declared that the bliss of the 
righteous is everlasting. With equal directness and 
simplicity they declare that the doom of the wicked 
is everlasting."'* 

In a private letter which was probably one of his 
latest utterances on this subject Mr. Beecher's mind 
appears to have inclined very strongly to the theory 
of conditional immortality. 

In closing his address before the Ministerial As- 
sociation, Mr. Beecher said: "I have endeavored 
through stormy times, through all forms of excite- 
ment, to make known what was the nature of God 
and what He expected human life to be, and to bring 
to bear upon that one point every power and influence 
in me. I have nothing that I kept back, neither 
reason, nor wit, nor humor, nor moral sensibility, nor 
social affection. I have poured my whole being into 
the ministry with this one object — to glorify God by 
lifting man up out of the natural state into the pure 



» " Life," p. 505. 

^ " Sermons," Harper's edition, Vol. I., p. 209. 



NEW LIGHT ON OLD PROBLEMS. 425 

spiritual life. I never was in warmer personal 
sympathy with every one of you than I am now." 

Urgent efforts were made to induce him to recon- 
sider his resignation, but his determination was un- 
changed. The very deep pain and regret felt by all 
the members at his withdrawal were expressed in a 
cordial resolution. They recognized the generous 
magnanimity of his action, though they earnestly be- 
lieved that the exposition of his doctnnal views 
plainly indicated the propriety of his continued mem- 
bership in any Association. The resolutions closed 
with these words: " We desire to place on record, as 
the result of a long and intimate acquaintance with 
Mr. Beecher, and familiar observation of the results 
of his life as well as of his preaching and pastoral 
work, that we cherish for him an ever-growing per- 
sonal attachment as a brother beloved and a deepen- 
ing sense of his work as a Christian jninister. We 
cannot now contemplate the possibility of his future 
absence from our meetings without a depressing sense 
of the loss we are to suffer, and unitedly pledge the 
hearts of the Association to him, and express the hope 
that the day of his return may soon come." "^ 

In a letter to Dr. Philip Schaff, the learned Church 
historian, Mr. Beecher describes his theology in 1885 
as "evangelical, progressive, and anti-Calvinistic/* 
and Dr. Schaff writes: " The redeeming trait in 
Henry Ward Beecher's theology, the crowning excel- 
lence of his character, the inspiration of his best 
words and deeds, was his simple childlike faith and 
burning love of Christ whom he adored as the eternal 



» " Life," p. 506. ? " Life," p. 507. 



426 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Son of God, the friend of the poor, and the Saviour 
of all men." ' 

Dr. Charles Hodge, of Princeton, is said to have 
remarked of Mr. Beecher, " Whatever fault men find 
with his head, his heart is right." 

It can scarcely be doubted that Mr. Beecher under- 
valued systematic theology, although he studied it 
more carefully than most people have imagined. It 
was ever his habit to have some book of theology 
within his reach during his long lecture tours. The 
complaint that Mr. Beecher's later teaching was 
"substantially unbiblical in tone" is a very grave 
indictment which will be earnestly disputed by many. 
Doubtless his later theology was unduly colored by 
his reading of Herbert Spencer and his enthusiastic 
advocacy of evolutionary theories. Even his earlier 
preaching seemed to many unbiblical in tone, because 
of its originality, novelty of emphasis, and freedom 
from many of the conventionalities. But this is to 
be said, that no one has a right to estimate Mr. 
Beecher by any fragmentary and sporadic reading of 
him. Only a large acquaintance is a just acquaint- 
ance. The critic is often tempted to say that his 
preaching lacked this or that important element, but 
reading on he finds what he thought was wanting. 
Mr. Beecher's sermons would doubtless be more satis- 
factory to the student if his statements were more 
fully qualified and balanced here and there, but this 



' " Beecher Memorial," p. 88. 

^ " Current Religious Perils," Boston Monday Lectures, Joseph 
Cook, 1888, p. 134. 



NEW LIGHT ON OLD PROBLEMS. 427 

was not Mr. Beecher's way, neither was it the way of 
Paul or of Jesus. 

It is probable that Mr. Beecher did not count as a 
large help to evangelistic work in his later years, 
partly because of the doubt with which his theological 
position was popularly regarded, and partly because 
all of his energies were taxed with labors not directly 
evangelistic, and partly, it would seem from a lessen- 
ing of some of the elements and forces in that 
strenuous faith which had early made him an earnest 
and whole-souled revivalist. It was felt by many 
that his mind had turned too exclusively to the 
gentler and more generous aspects of the Gospel, 
and it is probable that his championship of what 
he deemed theological reform diverted his soul in 
some measure from evangelistic effort. 

Did he overvalue the new light which he had 
gained from evolution ^ In a letter written* in 1886 
to Mr. Alfred Rose, editor of T/ie Ptilpii of To-day, 
consenting to the publication of his sermons in 
pamphlet form, Mr. Beecher said : *' It may be that it 
is a sign of advancing years that just now I am more 
willing to have them published than I ever was 
before. But, to me, it seems as if God's Kingdom 
was opening to me and in me more than ever before, 
and my heart runs deeper than ever before. I do not 
feel that I am a prophet, or that I am opening a new 
dispensation or creating a new theology, but I feel 
that I am a forerunner of the great outpouring of 
the Holy Spirit on earth and that we are near the 
time when a great and glorious advance in religious 
experience will be disclosed. I have a zeal for the 
coming Kingdom of God. I would that I could do 



428 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

more than cry, * Prepare ye the way of tlie Lord,' 
but I am unspeakably grateful that I can do that."* 

Mr. Beecher's contributions to theological progress 
were doubtless considerable What he wrote on 
Evolution, if appearing to-day for the first time, 
would excite less adverse criticism than fell on his 
utterances at that time. It was his misfortune, as 
a theological leader, partly from his temperament 
and partly from circumstances, to be always success- 
ful in stirring up such an amount of controversy that 
his theological opinions were rarely estimated at 
their true value. Whatever truths he may have over- 
looked or misunderstood, and however marked his 
failure to prophesy according to what may be 
deemed the right proportion of faith, he was a true 
pioneer of the larger and more Christlike Christianity 
of the future. Whatever his mistakes, it will be 
difficult to find any other man of his age who covered 
a larger area in the whole domain of truth than 
did Henry Ward Beecher. 



* From T. J. Ellinwood's " Reminiscences.' 



CHAPTER XLII. 

PULPIT THUNDERER AND PLUMED KNIGHT. 

Mr. Beecher's most important relations to political 
life in his later years were connected with the Presi- 
dential campaign of 1884, when he gave his great 
influence for the election of Governor Cleveland. He 
had spoken with unequaled power for the election of 
Fremont, in 1856, and Lincoln, in i860. Plymouth 
Church had been thronged Sunday evenings with 
excited multitudes in 1864, when he plead for the 
reelection of the honest and far-sighted chief magis- 
trate whose hand on the helm of State had been 
so steady and strong. He had favored Grant in 1868 
and 1872; had spoken for Hayes in 1876 and for Gar- 
field in 1880. He had taken an active part in attack- 
ing the corrupt judges of New York City in 1868-9, 
and had worked faithfully for good government in 
Brooklyn. 

As the questions which led to the war, and were 
entailed by it, had been largely settled, and settled 
right, Mr. Beecher's attitude toward the Republican 
party became more independent. As the chief differ- 
ences between the leading parties of the United States 
had to do with the protective tariff, and Mr. Beecher 
was a pronounced free-trader, his alliance with the 
Republicans grew less firm. He was greatly pleased 



430 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

with the unexpected wisdom shown by Mr. Arthur in 
the Presidential office, and earnestly desired his nomi- 
nation by the Republicans in 1884. He was griev- 
ously disappointed when the Republicans presented 
the name of Mr. Blaine, whom he had come to dis- 
trust. He also felt that many of those who were 
most prominent in supporting that brilliant but 
unfortunate leader, represented the corrupter elements 
of the Republican party. The nomination by the 
Democrats of Governor Cleveland, whom he had come 
to admire, made it possible for him to break away 
from his old affiliations. 

Mr. N. D. Pratt, in his reminiscences, writes: " Mr. 
Beecher was personally opposed to Blaine, honestly 
believing him unfit for the Presidency. In conversa- 
tion with him in April of that year he told me that if 
Mr. Blaine was nominated it would split the Republi- 
can party. An admirer of Mr. Blaine and a believer 
in him, as I was, it seemed intolerable to think of Mr. 
Beecher opposing him. When he was nominated, 
Mr. Beecher was for a long time silent. R. W. Ray- 
mond wrote me during the campaign that he thought 
that Mr. Beecher's purpose was to be silent and not 
to oppose Mr. Blaine. But injudicious friends kept 
after him and were not satisfied with his silence, but 
seemed determined to make him speak for the Repub- 
lican candidate. Finally many injudiciously threat- 
ened him that if he went on the stump for Cleveland 
they would rake up his old trouble. This stirred the 
lion within him, and he took the platform for the 
Democratic candidate." 

" As did thousands of his friends, I wrote a long 
letter to Mr. Beecher and besought him not to let his 



PULPIT THUNDERER AND PLUMED KNIGHT. 431 

friends have the bitter memory of him, perhaps in 
the last campaign in which he might engage, advo- 
cating the defeat of the grand old Republican party 
for which he had done so much in years past. Mr. 
Beecher heeded none of these letters, and all of us who 
believed in him felt that his course was certainly 
taken after conscientious and earnest deliberation. 
He was mistaken in his judgment of Mr. Blaine, and 
I cannot help believing that, if he had lived to wit- 
ness the wise, conservative, statesmanlike course of 
Mr. Blaine while in charge of the State Department 
during the Harrison administration, he would have 
admitted that he had misjudged him, for no one was 
quicker to correct an error than Mr. Beecher." 

Believing earnestly that Cleveland would make a 
safe and honest President, discerning in him those 
qualities which have given him such phenomenal suc- 
cess as a political leader, and believing, after honest 
and careful inquiry that Mr. Cleveland had been 
maliciously slandered as to his private life, Henry 
Ward Beecher entered with great zeal into the cam- 
paign. That zeal was inspired by some of the strong- 
est feelings and bitterest memories of his life. " When 
in the gloomy night of my own suffering, I sounded 
every depth of sorrow, I vowed that if God would 
bring the day-star of Hope, I would never suffer 
brother, friend, or neighbor to go unfriended should 
a like serpent seek to crush him. That oath I will 
regard now, because I know the bitterness of venomous 
lies. I will stand against infamous lies which seek to 
sting to death an upright man and magistrate. Men 
counsel me to prudence lest I stir again my own 
griefs. No, I will not be prudent. If I refuse to in- 



432 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

terpose the shield of well-placed confidence between 
Governor Cleveland and the swarm of liars that nuz- 
zle in the mud or sling arrows from ambush, may my 
tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth and my right 
hand forget its cunning. I will imitate the noble 
example set by Plymouth Church in the day of my 
calamity. They were not ashamed of my bonds. 
They stood by me with God-sent loyalty. It was a 
heroic deed. They have set my duty before me and 
I will imitate their example." ^ 

The campaign of 1884 was one of unparalleled per- 
sonal bitterness. The friends who knew Mr. Blaine 
most intimately felt that the conduct of some of his 
opponents was an outrage on that chivalrous, patri- 
otic, and high-minded statesman. The Hon, Nelson 
Dingley, Jr., has written: "The unjust and bitter 
criticism and personal defamation to which he was 
subjected in some quarters from the time it became 
known in 1876 that he was an aspirant for the Presi- 
dency, seemed like -a burlesque to those who inti- 
mately knew Mr. Blaine, who understood the perfect 
purity and integrity of his private life, the nobility of 
his aims and purposes, and the magnanimity and 
kindness of his nature." ' 

During that acrimonious campaign of 1884, many 
of Mr. Beecher's truest friends regretted that, while 
manifesting such a noble and chivalrous sympathy 
for one of the maligned candidates, he had only bit- 
ter and depreciative words for the other candidate 
who, as they believed, was equally worthy and patri- 
otic, and even more fiercely maligned. It seemed to 



* ** Biography/' p. 578. * The Independent^ February 2, 1893. 



PULPIT THUNDERER AND PLUMED KNIGHT. 433 

them strange that, while Mr. Blaine was forced, after 
having been vindicated in the judgment of his peers, 
to fight for all that makes life dear and sacred, and also 
that, when the chief hold that his enemies had over him 
came from his own private letters, Mr. Beecher, with 
his similar past experience, appeared to have forgotten 
for the time both charity and magnanimity. 

Since 1884, Cleveland and Blaine have risen higher 
and higher in the esteem of their countrymen. Polit- 
ical friends and foes alike applauded Mr. Blaine's 
grand career in the Department of State, and mourned 
his death as that of the most inspiring and thoroughly 
American leader since Lincoln. Beecher's failure to 
appreciate what was great and noble in Mr. Blaine is 
only another evidence of that poor judgment of men 
which sometimes had brought him into sorest per- 
sonal trouble. But it should be remembered by the 
most ardent friends of the Plumed Knight that, how- 
ever extravagant Mr. Beecher's denunciations of Mr. 
Blaine may have been, they were surpassed on an 
earlier occasion by Mr. Beecher's condemnation of him- 
self. Some of Mr. Blaine's misfortunes, like Beecher's, 
arose from intimate association with unworthy friends, 
and it would have only been charitable in the great 
preacher to have remembered that when Mr. Blaine's 
conduct was officially investigated his brave and 
manly explanation was at that time generally ac- 
cepted, even by bitter foes, as ample vindication. 

Remembering the safe course which Mr. Cleveland 
has pursued, it is hard to-day to realize how deep 
and wide-spread was the alarm over his possible 
election, and how fierce was the antagonism to Mr. 
Beecher on the part of many of his friends in 1884. 
28 



434 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Plymouth Church was threatened with disruption. 
Nearly all the members sided against their pastor. 
As usual in the great crises of his life, Mr. Beecher 
was repeatedly informed that he had ruined himself 
and his influence. It required all his stubborn cour- 
age, backed by a thorough conviction that he was 
rigiit, to take and maintain the position which he 
assumed, outside of the Republican ranks. It is not 
too much to say that, in the even balance of voters in 
the State of New York, it was Mr. Beecher's influence 
that brought defeat to the party which included most 
of his warmest friends. Many of his former sup- 
porters were so indignant that they professed to be- 
lieve all that his enemies had ever said against him! 
He went to his death unforgiven by them. 

Calmer judgments will prevail. The bitterness of 
personal partisanship will give way to truer estimates 
both of the Pulpit Thunderer and of the Plumed 
Knight. Whatever his mistakes, his services to Lib- 
erty will keep green for ever the laurel on the grave 
of the one, and, standing by the tomb of the other, 
men will recall that, w^hatever his faults, he was 
buried, amid a Nation's proud tears, in an honored 
sepulchre; that he was the American who taught his 
countrymen to believe in themselves and their impe- 
rial destiny, and that, as the pioneer and chief pro- 
moter of commercial relations and international 
friendship among the peoples of the Western Hemi- 
sphere, he holds the same historic position toward the 
Greater America that Chatham held, more than a 
century ago, toward the Greater Britain. 



CHAPTER XLIII. 

LAST VIEW OF THE OLD BATTLEFIELD. 

It was the good fortune of Mr. Beecher, both in 
America and in England, to be a messenger of peace 
and good will as well as an apostle of righteousness. 
Hawng fought with English mobs in 1863, it was his 
lot twenty-four years later to know all of the delights 
of a' royal English welcome. 

It was through the urgent persuasions of Mr. James 
B. Pond, his lecture-agent, that Henry Ward Beecher 
was induced to make this final visit to '' Our Old 
Home." Accompanied by Mrs. Beecher, he sailed in 
the Etruria on the 19th of June, 1886, and three thou- 
sand people from Plymouth Church, full of loyal 
enthusiasm, went down the harbor to give him a 
loving farewell. 

For four days he suffered from his usual sickness, 
but on his birthday, the 24th of June, when he was 
seventy-three years of age, he was able to appear on 
deck and was showered with birthday cards and let- 
ters which had been reserved for that time. 

Landing in Liverpool, he spent a quiet Sunday un- 
recognized in a great congregation. On the follow- 
ing day he heard a very powerful and luminous 
speech on the Home-Rule question by Mr. Gladstone. 



43^ HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

At the close of it he was presented to the English 
statesman, and, complimenting his address, he said: 
" I have no words to express myself in regard to its 
excellence." To this Mr. Gladstone replied: ''Cer- 
tainly you are a good judge of such efforts." Mr. 
Beecher was a believer in Home Rule, and, from an 
American standpoint, the question at issue seemed to 
him as simple as A B C. Earnest efforts were made 
to induce him to speak on the burning Irish question 
during the great campaign when the Grand Old Man 
met with such a memorable reverse, but he resolutely 
declined. 

In London Mr. and Mrs. Beecher were the guests 
of Dr. and Mrs. Parker at their home in Daleham 
Gardens. On Thursday morning, July ist, he at- 
tended the City Temple and heard a noble sermon 
on Job. At the close of the sermon. Dr. Parker pre- 
sented his illustrious friend, saying: " Last week there 
was in England one Grand Old Man; to-day there are 
two of them." Mr. Beecher was received with en- 
thusiasm. He spoke very simply and tenderly, and 
closed with a touching and sympathetic prayer. Mr. 
Beecher said, in a letter, " If I had ten times the (self) 
appreciation which I have, I must have been satisfied 
with my public reception. The great dailies an- 
nounced my arrival with leading editorials of all 
kinds; letters pour in by the bushel. Pond received 
seventy on a single morning. Dr. Parker had letters 
for me at Queenstown, and called on me at once in 
London. I am to lunch with him to-day (Friday, 
July 2d); go to the Lord Mayor's dinner at seven; 
invited to Mr. Phelps's (our Minister) next Monday. 
On to-day week a dinner is to be given me to which 



LAST VIEW OF THE OLD BATTLEFIELD. 437 

eminent men of all ranks are to come and various 
other attentions are preparing." ^ 

He was pleased to learn that the second edition of 
his " Evolution and Religion" had been sold, and 
that a third was on hand. It was a happy surprise to 
find that he was better knov/n in England even than 
America; ^hat his sermons were more widely circu- 
lated and read, and that even the cab-drivers and 
boys on the street recognized his face. 

Mr. Be'echer's first sermon was in the City Temple, 
and the congregation far overpassed the seating 
capacity of the church. The sermon was one of great 
power. The newspapers were somewhat startled by 
its occasional quaintness of expression and more than 
occasional humorousness. On July 9th, a banquet 
was given to Mr. Beecher at the Hotel Metropole at 
which eighty well known Englishmen and Americans 
sat down. The addresses were full of enthusiasm, 
and Mr. Beecher's response was such as he only could 
make. 

On July nth, he preached for Dr. Allon, in the 
Union Chapel at Islington. The great church was 
thronged, and many were turned away. In the after- 
noon he attended service in Westminster Abbey by 
special invitation, and called upon Dean Bradley 
where he met a number of English clergymen. In 
the Jerusalem Chamber he said: " I am struck with 
awe. No room has greater interest for me, unless it 
be the * Upper Room.* " He was entertained by 
Heni-y Irving at his home in Hammersmith, London, 
and he thought Mr. Irving's place " The Grange " 



* •* Summer in England with Henry Ward Beecher," p. 19. 



438 HENRY WARD BEFXHER. 

was the only place surpassing his own in Peekskill 
that he had ever seen. 

The famous Dr. Clifford, editor of The Baptist, s'Aid 
of Mr. Beecher's preaching in London: " Beecher 
must be heard to be fairly judged. One chief eharm 
and central inspiring force is the man. The whole 
soul of the man lives in his preaching. There is no 
vaporous rhetoric, no glittering phrase-making, no 
mere embroidery of speech, but overwhelming spirit- 
ual reality, a life that has been lived with God, and 
speaks as if from the divine presence, strong in soul- 
forces of unaffected goodness, unclouded faith, and 
the large-hearted love of men, a blending and inter- 
fusing of high moral and intellectual qualities, which 
fills you with a sense and emotion of the marvelous. 
As I meditated on what I heard, I constantly recalled 
the wealth of ideas of John Foster, the large views of 
Robertson, the rich fancy of Jeremy Taylor, the wit 
and shrewd humor of Thomas Fuller, the spirituality 
of Thomas a Kempis and the burning love of the 
Apostle John."' 

Mr. Beecher preached in Bradford, Liverpool, Car- 
lisle, Glasgow, Edinburgh, ..Scarborough, Torquay, 
Brighton, and several times in London. Perhaps the 
most remarkable reception which he received was 
given by the London Congregational Board in 
Memorial Hall, September 26th. On October 15th, 
he gave an address to theological students in the City 
Temple. There were six hundred of these, besides 
more than six hundred ministers, who listened to his 
address. 



' *' A Summer in England with Heniy Ward Beecher,'' pp. 37-3S. 



LAST VIEW OF THE OLD BATTLEFIELD. 439 

His first lecture was given in Exeter Hall, London, 
on July 19th He had not spoken in Exeter Hall since 
October, 1863, and that was under vastly different 
circumstances. In this address he said: " If England 
is not proud of America, why, then, the latter will 
make her so." Canon Farrar, Canon Fleming, and 
many other well-known preachers of England heard 
this first lecture on " The Reign of the Common 
People." The occasion was deemed a triumph. 

It is needless to recall all the incidents of his last 
summer in Great Britain in order to give an impres- 
sion of the great cordiality with which he was received 
in England, Scotland, and Ireland. " Between the 
4th of July and the 21st of October, fifteen and one- 
half weeks, Mr. Beecher preached seven times, gave 
nine public addresses, and delivered fifty-eight lec- 
tures. For the fifty-eight lectures he cleareid the sum 
of eleven thousand six hundred dollars, net of all 
expenses for himself and Mrs. Beecher, from the day 
they sailed from New York, June 19th, to the day 
they arrived at their home in Brooklyn, October 31st. 
That was his summer vacation." * 

On his last day in England, October i8th, he was 
given a reception by the Liverpool Congregational 
Board, and one of the addresses was made by Rev. 
Charles A. Berry, of Wolverhampton, with whom Mr. 
Beecher was so greatly pleased that he marked him 
out for his own successor. Within about a year from 
that time Mr. Berry was called to the pastorate of 
Plymouth Church, but declined the invitation. 

Dr. Parker, whose kindnesses to Mr. Beecher were 



' " A Slimmer in England with Henry Ward Beecher,'* p. 122. 



44^ HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

incessant, and to whom Mr. Beecher's heart had gone 
out with strong tenderness, has given a report of the 
great American's reception in England. Wherever 
he spoke the largest churches were entirely inade- 
quate for the accommodation of the people who com- 
pletely blocked all the approaches. Mr. Beecher 
himself was simply amazed at the " unanimity and 
extent of the recognition of his ministry by pastors, 
students, and preachers all over the Christian com- 
munity. In many a group of ministers I have seen 
Mr. Beecher standing as a father, giving and receiv- 
ing blessing." 

" He was hospitably entertained by the American 
residents of London and the provinces, also by the 
Lord Mayor of London, the London Congregational 
Board, an Association of Ministers in Glasgow, the 
Congregational District Board of Liverpool, and by a 
General Meeting of Ministers in Belfast; it will be 
further proved when I tell you that the Right Hon. 
William E.Gladstone invited Mr. Beecher to hospital- 
ity, and that, amongst those who wrote to him, 
alluded to his services, welcomed him, and in some 
other way expressed their interest in him were Lord 
Iddesleigh, the Dean of Westminster, Dean of Canter- 
bury, Archdeacon Farrar, Canon Wilberforce, Canon 
Fleming, Baroness Burdett-Coutts, Ellen Terry, 
Henry Irving, Sir John Lubbock, George Jacob 
Holyoake, Prof. Tyndall, Herbert Spencer, and 
innumerable members of Parliament."^ 

When in England in 1886 he wrote: " I want to 
come home. I have wandered enough. I cannot say 



* " Parker's Eulogy," p. 24. 



LAST VIEW OF THE OLD BATTLEFIELD. 441 

I have rested enough for I have been kept very busy. 
I long every year to lay down my tasks and depart. 
It is not a judgment formed on reasonable grounds. 
It is simply a quiet longing of the spirit, a brooding 
desire to be through with my work, although I am 
willing to go on, if need be."^ 



* Knox's " Life of Beecher," p. 521. 



CHAPTER XLIV. 

NIGHT COMETH AND THE ETERNAL MORNING. 

Mr. Beecher's work was nearly over. Though 
returning in apparently vigorous health, his brain 
had had no rest. The Common Council of Brooklyn 
voted him a public reception but he declined it. 
Plymouth Church was decorated with flowers and 
evergreen vines when the pastor appeared again 
behind the olive-wood pulpit, and the old life of work 
was renewed. In the winter he took up once more the 
" Life of Christ," and also made a contract to publish 
his autobiography before July ist, 1888. He was 
busy every week with letters to The Chi'istian Union, 
and preached every Sunday. His mind worked 
vigorously and clearly and he once said of the " Life 
of Christ": "No man could in a lifetime write all I 
now see ; how can I put it into one book ? " 

Conversing with an English clergyman, shortly 
before his final illness, with regard to the completion 
of his book, Mr. Beecher fell into a reverie, and, look- 
ing out of the window, he said : "Finish the Life of 
Christ. Finish the Life of Christ, Who can finish 
the Life of Christ? it cannot be finished." 

He was soon to be with his Lord. On the 3d 
of March he seemed perfectly well. Mrs. Beecher 



NIGHT COMETH AND THE ETERNAL MORNING. 443 

had planned to sail for Florida on the 8th 
of that month. On the 3d he went with his 
wife on a shopping trip to New York. Mrs. 
Beecher said : " I never knew my husband so lively, 
tender, or joyous before, or not in a long time " At 
nine o'clock that night he retired feeling weary. 
This' was an hour earlier than usual. Mrs. Beecher 
was busy writing until one o'clock in the morning, 
and, finding her husband asleep at that time she 
decided to lie down in an adjoining room. In a few 
hours she was aroused, and going to Mr. Beecher's 
bedside found him suffering with extreme nausea. 
He said it was only a sick headache. He was soon 
sleeping again and was aroused by neither the rising 
bell nor the breakfast bell. 

He slept through that day, and not until four 
o'clock in the afternoon was Dr. Searle, his physician, 
sent for. The doctor shook him by the shoulder and 
he slowly aroused himself. Mrs. Beecher said ; 
" Father, you must get up and dress. It is afternoon 
and you will have to go to prayer-meeting. Do you 
hear me?" ''Yes, I hear, but I don't want to get up. 
I will not go to prayer-meeting to-night. Tell them 
" But here he fell asleep again. 

At seven the doctor returned and looked grave. 
"Raise your hand," he said. "Can you raise yonr 
hand ? " " I — can — raise — it — high — enough — to — hit 
— you." The lips were smiling, the tones deep, but 
the hand he could not raise. Mr. Beecher looked 
earnestly upon his wife and the doctor. The 
physician's grave face told the story, and Mr. Beecher 
closed his eyes " and gave the hand of his wife a 
long^ strong, and earnest pressure. It was the 



444 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

realization of the inevitable ; it was farewell. He 
never opened his eyes again." ^ 

Drs. Hammond and Helmuth were called in from 
New York, and found that nothing could be done but 
to wait for the end. Sunday was a sad and anxious 
day in Plymouth Church. It was Communion Sun- 
day. The hush of the solemn service was broken by 
sobs. On Monday and Tuesday evenings prayer-ser- 
vices were held in the lecture-room. "It was a 
noticeable fact that no one prayed for the pastor's 
recovery, it was accepted by all as a fact unalterable, 
that the time of his going home had come, and not 
one of those that loved him would have called him 
back.'"^ 

" When the end approached all the household were 
gathered. It was their unanimous wish that none 
but themselves and the physicians should be present, 
but the wish could not be entirely effected. When 
the end came all of the Beecher blood knelt or stood 
around. Not one of them shed a tear or gave ex- 
pression to a sob then and there. The supreme self- 
control was in obedience to Mr. Beecher's often- 
expressed hope and wish that around his bed of release 
not tears should fall but the feeling should prevail 
as with those who think of a soul gone to its crown- 
ing." = 

Mr. Beecher died on Tuesday, March 8, 1887, at 
half past nine o'clock. 

Mr. Beecher had always been opposed to the use of 
crape, deeming it a pagan symbol. He had said, 
" Provide flowers for me when I am gone," and within 



1 i< 



Life," p. 633. 5 " Life," pp. 634-635. ' " Life," p. 634. 



NIGHT COMETH AND THE ETERNAL MORNING. 445 

ten minutes after he had passed from earth a wreath 
of roses was hung upon his door. 

" And he shall wear a truer crown 
Than any wreath tliat man can weave him, 
***** * 

God accept him, Christ receive him." 

Probably no such evidences of sorrow have ever 
been shown at the funeral of a private person in 
America as accompanied the burial of Henry Ward 
Beecher. It had been his wish that his much-beloved 
friend, Rev. Charles H. Hall, of the Church of the 
Holy Trinity, should conduct the service at his 
funeral hour. He had been a brave and trusting 
friend in times of sorest trial. In his remarks at the 
house, among other things, Dr. Hall said: "There 
was no man whom I ever heard, or whose works I 
have ever read, who inspired me so deeply with the 
inspiration of the Holy Spirit. He was a man of 
men, the most manly man I ever met, but he was also 
a man of God in the preeminent sense of the word." 

At the close of the private funeral services which 
were held at the house on Thursday, Company G. of 
the Thirteenth Regiment escorted, as guard of honor, 
the body of Mr. Beecher to the Church where for 
thirty-seven years his voice had spoken to all man- 
kind. No emblems of mourning were placed among 
the funeral decorations, but flowers, evergreens, palms, 
and twining smilax transformed the organ and the 
pulpit and the platform into a wilderness of splendor 
and fragrance. Mrs. S. V. White had upholstered 
with carnations, roses, and smilax the chair in which 
the pastor had sat for so many years. *' The coffin 



446 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

itself was entirely covered with flowers, lilies of the 
valley, maidenhair fern, and smilax." 

From half past eleven o'clock in the morning until 
ten o'clock at night, an uninterrupted throng of peo- 
ple passed into the church to take a last look at one 
who had never feared the face of man, and who had 
lived his life bravely and truly in the face of God and 
of the people. The organ was played now and then, 
and appropriate music was sung during nearly twelve 
hours. 

On Friday those who were personally invited were 
admitted to Plymouth Church for the public serv- 
ices. Only members of the Church and those 
especially asked, including some of the most distin- 
guished men of the country, eminent ministers of all 
denominations, including several Catholic clergymen, 
were admitted. Business was suspended in Brooklyn 
during the hour of the service, all the schools — public 
and private — the courts and public offices in Brook- 
lyn were closed by order of the City Government. 
Great throngs attended the funeral services which 
were held in four other churches, the First Baptist 
Church, the First Presbyterian Church, the Church of 
the Saviour, and the Sands Street Methodist Church, 
where glowing addresses were made in honor of one 
who had loved all Christians and all men. Rabbi 
Harrison said among other things: "All sects re- 
vered him, all Churches and creeds recognized in him 
the incarnation of their best thought. He stands at 
the head of his age and his fame will always remain." 
Dr. Talmage thought the Colosseum at Rome, which 
held eighty thousand spectators, would have been in- 
sufficient to accommodate the people who wished to 



NIGHT COMETH AND THE ETERNAL MORNING. 447 

do honor to the great friend of humanity. In his 
address at the funeral Dr. Hall referred very feelingly 
to the unfinished " Life of Christ," and reminded his 
hearers " that, though the English-speaking race 
to-day mourns his call and recognizes its loss, Amer- 
icans feel that he has been a great leader or adviser 
in the guidance of all manner of substantial interests, 
though the Legislature of the State has paid him an 
unusual honor — of adjourning — as his right, though the 
press and divines and orators of all degrees are try- 
ing to compass the mighty theme in glowing words, 
in words of exulting grief that we have had him with 
us so long — and have lost him — yet, that, as he lies 
there so quiet, we may look at him as one who had 
been, through all and in all things, an apostle of one 
supreme thought, a preacher of the everlasting Gos- 
pel of the ever-living Christ." 

Very beautifully Dr. Hall told the story of Mr. 
Beecher's last evening in Plymouth Church ; how 
after " the congregation had retired from it, the 
organist and one or two others were practising the 

hymn — 

' I heard the voice of Jesus say 
Come unto Me and rest.' 

* Mr. Beecher, doubtless with that tire that follows 
a preacher's Sunday work, remained and listened. 
Two street urchins were prompted to wander into the 
building and one of them was standing perhaps in the 
position of the boy whom Raphael has immortalized, 
gazing up at the organ. The old man, laying his hands 
.on the boy's head, turned his face upward and kissed 
him, and, with his arms about the two, left the scene 
of his triumphs, his trials, and his successes for ever." 



44^ HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

" It was a fitting close to a grand life, — the old man 
of genius and fame shielding the little wanderers ; 
great in breasting traditional ways and prejudices, 
great also in the gesture so like him, that recognized, 
as did the Master, that the humblest and the poorest 
were his brethren, — the great preacher led out into 
the night by the little nameless waifs." 

After the close of Dr. Hall's address, the congrega- 
tion took their last look of the well-beloved face 
which they had seen so often glowing like the face of 
the great leader who came down the mountain from 
the presence of God. Then the doors of the church 
were opened, and once more the public were ad- 
mitted. The grief-smitten crowd reached in a line 
almost down to Fulton Ferry, more than half a mile 
away. Nearly one hundred thousand people, by 
actual count, passed by the sacred coffin. 

On Saturday, the 12th of March, the body, accom- 
panied by about fifty persons, including the officers 
and prominent members of the Church, was taken to 
Greenwood Cemetery where, after a touching prayer 
by the Rev. Mr. Halliday, the casket was placed in 
the vault. Underneath a decoration of palms, and 
amid the mourning of the American people, Henry 
Ward Beecher was at rest. 

He himself had always said that dying was the 
best part of life to those who live worthily ; that 
death was as blessed as bird-singing in spring and 
sweet as flowers ; that its path was rosy, and royal, 
and golden. He had often yearned for dying. ^* I 
have drunk at many a fountain, but thirst came 
again ; I have fed at many a bounteous table, but 
hunger remained ; I have seen many bright and 



NIGHT COMETH AND THE ETERNAL MORNING. 449 

lovely things, but while I gazed their luster faded. 
There is nothing here that can give me rest, but 
when I behold Thee, Oh God, I shall be satisfied." 
"Our foremost citizen,*' as Dr. Chadwick called him, 
great in achievements, great in character, whose 
heart had brooded with tenderest love over all men, 
and whose fame had touched all horizons, was safe at 
last from all human assault, safe in the hearts of 
the people, at home in the bosom of God. 

Mr. Beecher incarnated American democracy in 
all its higher tendencies, and the people everywhere 
mourned him. In New York, Brooklyn, and through- 
out the land, the pulpit, on the Sunday following 
his death, uttered the National voice in regard to his 
transcendent abilities and his wide-reaching services. 
As Mr. Beecher had touched all classes of American 
citizens, so his death was mourned by all. 

Of course, w^ords of criticism were frequent enough. 
His views had not suited exactly the views of any 
school of thought, whether in politics or in religion, 
but he had a great hold on all good men and all good 
men had a share in him. The Union League Club 
and many other clubs expressed their grief and 
admiration in suitable words. The Clerical Unions 
of New York, Boston, and Chicago paid tribute to 
the illustrious dead. The Clerical Union of Brook- 
lyn, representing many denominations, in its reso- 
lutions rehearsed the great qualities which " made 
him supreme among the preachers and orators of his 
time." The New York Legislature, in adjourning on 
the day of his funeral, declared his fame one of the 
brightest possessions of the State. 



29 



CHAPTER XLV. 



THIS WAS A MAN. 



Even his enemies, who were legion, never failed to 
recognize in Mr. Beecher a great antagonist. To his 
friends, he was as good as he was great. He had the 
power of turning his enemies into friends. An ex-Con- 
federate officer, visiting in New York, who had made 
up his mind to hear Beecher, and who said, " It 
would do me good to take a rifle along and just put a 
bullet through him as he stands in the pulpit pretend- 
ing to preach the Gospel," went with the Rev. Frank 
Russell to Plymouth Church in 1865, and poured out 
his whispered criticisms at almost everything he saw 
and heard. He was not subdued by the singing; he 
was somewhat quieted by the prayer; the sermon 
awakened a great struggle in his mistaken soul and 
tears came to his eyes. As he walked to the ferry he 
said: " I swear I believe I have been egregiously 
mistaken about that man." The next Sunday he was 
introduced to Mr. Beecher, and from that time could 
not endure to hear a word spoken against him.^ 

Mr. George W. Cable, said of him: '* He united 
larger proportions of strength and benevolence than 
any other man I ever knew." He was beloved by the 
great masses of the American people, not only by those 
of New England blood, but equally by the negro, 



1 Rev. Frank Russell, "Life," p. 384. 



"this was a man. 451 

the Irish, Jew, German, and Catholic. '* Towards 
the Jews he acted the part of a man and brother in 
the truest sense." ^ 

Some small men could never begin to understand 
Henry Ward Beecher. He was so various, so uncon- 
ventional, so original, so unlike themselves. The 
difference between him and other eminent men seemed 
to be partly a difference in abundance of life. As 
with Phillips Brooks, he was affluent with animal, 
intellectual, and spiritual life. He was intensely vital, 
intensely human. Mr. Beecher was a luxuriant forest 
full of trees of all sizes and shapes, not an artificial 
French garden set out with boxed trees and laid out 
in geometric forms. It is easier to understand men 
of another mould. When a man is like a single ever- 
green tree, symmetrical, simple, and scarcely ever 
changing, he is more easily comprehended. 

Mr. Beecher was grandly positive. Abounding in 
all things, his cup ran over and sometimes spilled 
over. He was so thoroughly human that we think of 
him as one of ourselves, entering sympathetically into 
the spirit of our common life. We are almost sur- 
prised when he suddenly towers up a hero. What 
Lowell so finely sang of Lincoln was equally true of 
Mr. Beecher. 

'* His was no lonely mountain peak of mind. 
Thrusting to thin air o'er our cloudy bars, 
A sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind ; 
Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined. 
Fruitful and friendly to all human kind. 
Yet also nigh to heaven, and loved of loftiest stars." 



^ Felix Adler, " Beecher Memorial," p. 97. 



452 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

It is easy to catalogue the qualities which he, in a 
large measure, illustrated; to speak of his courage, 
enthusiasm, tenderness, versatility, frankness, genial- 
ity, magnetism, philanthropy, intensity, mettlesome- 
ness, patience, modesty, toilsomeness, catholicity, 
tolerance, sympathy, common sense, unresentfulness, 
righteousness, wrathfulness, lovableness, transparent 
purity, unconventionality, perennial humor, humility, 
loneliness, mental fertility, comprehensiveness of 
vision, and all the riches of his prophetic and poetic 
gifts; but a half hour's acquaintance with him in his 
best mood, whether in public or in private, is worth 
more than all such cataloguing. 

It was the man rather than the clergyman that the 
people recognized and loved. " He seemed to me," 
said General Sherman, " more like an army comrade 
than a minister of the Gospel." * 

Speaking with enthusiasm. Grant once called him 
"a great noble-hearted boy." His life was war, his 
heart was peace and love. " He was a soldier of the 
church militant, but his warfare was with human 
wrong and misery, with false theories of life, and 
poor aims and ambitions." '^ 

Mr. R, W. Raymond said of him : " I never met 
another man who was so entirely the same in public 
and in private." 

From whom shall we learn the truth about Henry 
Ward Beecher unless from those who saw him most 
and loved him most? On whom does the light of a 
man's character cast his real image if not upon his 



' " Memorial Volume," p. 3. 

''George William Curtis, " Beecher Memorial," p. 21. 



"this was a man 453 

friends ? '' The simple trutli is that no experienced 
lawyer who knew him could ever have failed to see 
that nothing but the utmost courage, candor, and 
truthfulness would at any time fit the character of 
Henry Ward Beecher. . . . For any counsel to 
advise him to utter an evasion, much less a false- 
hood, would have been worse than a crime — it 
would have been an unpardonable blunder." 

"No man who knew Mr. Beecher intimately could 
doubt that he was preeminently a man of God 
and walked with God." * 

In body, Henry Ward Beecher was more of the 
English than of the American type, but his face and 
brow suggested no nationality. They were the 
expression of his own mobile spirit and lofty genius. 
"The modern English Broad Church," says Higgin- 
son, " aims at breadth of shoulders as well as of 
doctrines. Our American saintship also has begun 
to have a body to it — a body of divinity indeed." 
Although of large and robust vitality, Mr. Beecher's 
physical health was not perfect. He was one of 
those civilized men who need to take wise and 
thoughtful care of themselves. He was an example 
to all preachers in the thought which he gave to the 
body. He was abstemious, never a very hearty 
eater, using food as an engineer uses fuel. His 
physical resources were enormous, and it was part of 
his religion to breathe good air and enjoy sound 
sleep, and plenty of it, to take good food, and not 
too much of It. He was a man of physical courage 



* " Henry Ward Beecher — A Memorial Service," p. 29. 
2 Lyman Abbou, " Life," p. 654, 



454 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

and very cool in times of peril. He once killed a 
mad dog with a single stroke of an axe. Perhaps 
physical courage is sometimes a help to moral 
courage. "It seemed as easy for him to breast 
the currents of popular opinion, and to obstruct 
the force of heavy tyrannies, as it is for many to float 
on the changing stream of the one or to be instru- 
ments and supporters of the other." ^ 

He kept his body in thorough working order. " I 
am a total abstainer both in belief and practice. I 
hold that no man in health needs, or is the better for, 
alcoholic stimulants." Whatever use of stimulants 
he made when in poor health was " occasional, ex- 
ceptional, and wholly medicinal." At public dinners 
he was often a total abstainer from food and drink, his 
only indulgence being a drink of water. Mrs. Beecher 
says that when not so deeply interested in the con- 
versation as to neglect his food, he ate — as he did 
everything else — with vigor and evident enjoyment. 
** He well understood the difference between good and 
bad cooking." * 

When seated in the dining-room of the Ebbitt House, 
in Washington, his table was soon surrounded by 
many, eager to have a word, and everybody was kept 
laughing, as he had a theory that no serious subject 
should ever be discussed at dinner. 

" It was Mr. Beecher's custom to take a nap every 
afternoon for an hour or two, whether at home or 
abroad, traveling or wherever he might be. I have 
been riding on the train with him when he would talk 



^ Senator George F. Edmunds, " Beecher Memorial," p. 25. 
^ Mrs. Beecher in Ladies' Home Journal, March, 1892. 



"this was a man. 455 

in the most interesting way, drop off in the middle of 
a sentence into a sound sleep and sleep for some lit- 
tle time. He told me once that one secret of his good 
health was his ability to sleep so much, and that he 
would allow nothing to deprive him of his sleep. I 
was once at dinner on Sunday, at his home in Brook- 
lyn, and after dinner he took me to his two studies, 
showing me the various points of interest in his house, 
his library, his writing-desk, etc., etc., and some of 
the pictures of his father, of whom I said, he looked 
like a statesman. His answer was, * He was a states- 
man.* Then, the hour apparently having arrived for 
his nap, in the most courteous manner he said : * I 
hope often to see you in Brooklyn, come again, come 
always,' and then he began immediately to prepare 
for his afternoon sleep which w^as an indication to me 
that it was time for my visit to draw to a close." ^ 

Gen. Horatio C. King thought Mr. Beecher the best 
traveling companion he ever had known. It was his 
good fortune to be with him two weeks on a famous 
lecture tour throughout the West. " He always spoke 
of this as the time when he built his home at Peeks- 
kill out of wind."^ 

Those who knew him well found that he was as 
great and brilliant in conversation, when in the mood 
for talk, as he was in the pulpit. " I believe that Mr. 
Beecher's finest sayings have been spoken in private. 
The slightest tinge, of personal vanity would render 
this impossible."^ He appears to have had some 
very strong friendships. Among the men to whom 



* N. D. Prati's " Reminiscences." 

^ Knox's " Life of Beecher," p. 344. 

^ " Life," p. 345— Rev. William Burnet Wright, DcD, 



456 HF.NRY WARD BEECIIER. 

he was mQSt drawn out was Dr. John H. Raymond, his 
traveling companion of 1863. 

Whatever he studied he went into thoroughly. "In 
reply to a question about Herbert Spencer," says 
Rev. William Burnet Wright, " he gave me an account 
of Spencer and his w^ritings, with a wealth of bio- 
graphical details and a knowledge of the man's entire 
system which would have been remarkable in a care- 
fully prepared and written lecture. I have often 
tested him in the same way on other themes, only to 
find him equally well informed and ready." 

Mr. Beecher's conscience took the shape and quality 
and expressed the force and range of his understand- 
ing. It was unconventional, original, and sensitive 
where ordinary men are insensitive, and tolerant, flex- 
ible, and courteous where narrower understandings 
would have made its workings hard and rigid. There 
was nothing of the self-seeker in Henry Ward Beecher. 
*' I have no ambitions. I have sought no laurels ; I 
have deliberately rejected many things that would 
have been consonant to my taste. I remember as if 
it were yesterday, when I laid my literary ambition 
and scholarly desires upon the altar and said: If I 
can do more for my Master, and for men, by my style 
and manner of working, I am willing to work in a sec- 
ondary way, I am willing to leave writing behind my 
back, I am willing not to carve statues of beauty, but 
to do what would please God in the salvation of men." 

A missionary among the Sioux Indians recalls an 
incident of his personal kindness, as she deemed it. 
She was to speak to his people Sunday evening, on 
her work. He was to introduce her and then leave 
the platform, and slip away to hear some noted Eng- 



" THIS WAS A MAN. 457 

lish divine. He so rarely had an opportunity of hear- 
ing anybody preach that he wished to improve it. The 
missionary was rather glad of the absence of so famous 
a speaker, but, after she had delivered her address, the 
first person to greet her with a cordial shake of the 
hand was Mr. Beecher, who said: "You see I did 
not leave. I wanted to see if you could hold your 
hearers, and I became so interested in the Indians 
that I could not leave." 

" After his entirely legitimate observation, at one 
of the evening prayer-meetings, to the effect that 
rather than countenance or support mob-violence, a 
man ought to be willing to forego something of com- 
fort, and, if necessary, live on a dollar a day and get 
along on bread and water, and, for a change, water 
and bread, I believe that he felt that to a certain ex- 
tent, the sympathetic good will of great bodies of 
working men had been withdrawn, and that he had 
been in a sense misrepresented as not entirely one of 
them in every reasonable demand that they might 
make. I recollect one Sabbath that he referred with 
sudden and heartfelt eloquence to the subject, end- 
ing up what he had to say with these words: ^ Men 
say because I have told them most needful truths that 
I am not on the side of the working man, that I am 
not his friend. If I am not the friend of the working 
man, who is?' The manner in which the words were 
uttered could not fail to impress all present with Mr. 
Beecher's deep conviction that if it were not for his 
presence in the world, the working man would be 
friendless indeed." ^ 



* From a letter by W. E. Davenport, Brooklyn. 



45^ HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

There were flaws enough, doubtless, in this man's 
character, rough spots in this great soul, but, seen at 
his best, studied at times when most good men would 
look ugliest, watched when attacked by those whom 
he loved, aspersed and defiled by tongues set on fire 
with malice, his character appears so radiant with 
the spirit of Him who breathed forgiveness from the 
Cross, that it has large claims to be called saintly. I 
know not where else, among the great men of this 
country, to find in one nature such tremendous out- 
bursts against injustice and sin, and at the same time 
an equal force of Christiy character. The Son of 
Thunder was the Apostle of Love. 

" Great natures," says Lyman Abbott, " have great 
faults. But Mr. Beecher's were only faults — flaws on 
the surface — not vices that corrupted the heart." He 
was not always wise in his opinions, and often far 
from wise in presenting them. He well knew, as De- 
mosthenes said in his Oration on the Crown, that 
" men by nature listen joyfully to slanderers and de- 
famers," and yet even this knowledge did not lead him 
to cultivate the virtue of prudence. The defects of 
Mr. Beecher's character were as conspicuous, to eyes 
that search for defects, as his virtues. He was a man 
of superabundant force, and valued force more than 
symmetry or finish. As he said in his eulogy on Gen- 
eral Grant, '' Men without faults are apt to be men 
without force. A round diamond has no brilliancy. 
Lights and shadows, hills and valleys give beauty to 
the landscape. The faults of good and generous 
natures are often overripe goodness or the shadows 
which their virtues cast." 

It may have been an exhibition of his frank, fearless. 



" THIS WAS A MAN. 459 

and unselfish spirit that he put into self-condemning 
letters, which could be used to ruin him, the con- 
trition which he felt for the misfortunes he had 
brought to a friend's household; but the utter lack of 
foresight which this manifested must be condemned, 
as the sorrow which it occasioned fell heavily on 
innocent and trusting thousands. There were streaks 
of coarser grain running through what was fine in 
his nature. But if his imprudence and folly brought 
him into shame and clouded his days with distressing 
darkness, to him was given the grace to support his 
griefs with a Christian patience and sweet resig- 
nation, to which we can find few parallels. He 
had a divine hopefulness and saw at once the good 
in things most evil. 

Mr. Beecher was invited, in the days when he was 
deemed most of a heretic, to preach in one of the 
leading orthodox Churches of Chicago. Though 
the second half of his sermon was supremely beauti- 
ful, and brought tears to the eyes of many, as he 
pictured the suffering mother bending over her child 
as an illustration of divine love, the first part of the 
sermon was taken up with a severe criticism of some 
articles of the Westminster Confession of Faith. 
The pastor and many members of the Church 
thought him discourteous, or, at least, forgetful of 
the proprieties. What he actually said was far from 
being as severe and critical as remarks since made on 
the same theme by orthodox divines in the Pres- 
bytery of New York, but at that time members of 
the Presbyterian Communion were much more sen- 
sitive to criticism of their standards. Mr. George 
W. Cable, learning what Mr. Beecher had done, 



460 HENRY WARD REECTTF.R. 

expressed the opinion that there was nothing dis- 
courteous in Mr. Beecher's freeing his mind as he did. 
Mr. Beeclier afterwards expressed his regret at the 
unpleasant feeling that his sermon had occasioned, 
although he himself did not recall any severity, or 
anything that need be objectionable. It was always 
his custom, he said, to speak the truth as he believed 
it and as it appeared to him at the time of his speaking, 
no matter where he was.^ 

Mr. Beecher had not the practical wisdom and 
thoughtfulness of his father, Lyman Beecher. He 
was not an ideal man any more than Cromwell, Luther 
or the Apostle Paul. We think of him not as a statue, 
" moulded in colossal calm," but as a cataract thun- 
dering, grandiose, sparkling with foam, garlanded 
with rainbows. Grace, experience, and sorrow sub- 
dued and mellowed, as well as enlarged, his vigorous 
vitality, but the points of rugged strength in him 
were so prominent, that the moral artist would hardly 
say that he was statuesque, or, if so, we must look to 
the Goth, and not to the Greek, for our patterns. 
We define some men by what they lack. We say 
that they have not this fault or that peculiarity. Not 
so Mr. Beecher. He might have said, with George 
Eliot's Felix Holt, that he had not learned to measure 
himself by the negations in him. 

At Madison, Indiana, where the Rev. Harvey Cur- 
tis was the Presbyterian pastor, Mr. Beecher came to 

assist in a revival and was entertained by Mrs. . 

After the evening meetings, Mr. Beecher used to tell 
funny stories about the inquiry-room and the odd 



^From N. D. Pratt's " Reminiscences." 



"this was a man." 461 

people he met there. He could not help seeing and 
reporting these things. Of course he kept the young 
people in a roar of laughter, but the incongruity of 
his remarks had an unfortunate effect over some of 
them. Occasionally when persons with whom he was 
very familiar, became unendurably long-winded, he 
would listen to their tiresome stories, and then take a 
little candle, which he always carried in his bag, and 
stick it between his book and his near-sighted eyes, 
and read. He was often the guest in Chicago of Mrs. 

W , and he always talked about the odd people they 

had known in Indiana. Sometimes, when they had 
not met for months, he would enter the hall without 
saying a word, would put his umbrella up in the cor- 
ner in the funny familiar way of Mr. B , and they 

would all sit down convulsed with laughter. When 
persons called whom he did not like to talk with, he 
would be very polite and uncommunicative, and after 
they had gone and closed the door he would lift up 
the doormat and shake it gently. Rev. Dr. E. F. 
Williams was talking with Mr. Beecher in Plymouth 
Church during the meetings of the Council in 1876. 
Mr. Beecher was sitting on the platform, swinging his 
feet, and said in that deliberate tone in which pathos 
and humor mingled: " When I am dead, men will say, 
how they abused him, that great Mr. Beecher, how 
he was abused ! " 

Curious and laughable things seemed all the while 
happening in his life, and some of them had to do 
with his daily mail. All sorts of requests were for- 
warded by the letter-writing beggars. " One young 
man wanted Mr. Beecher to buy him a horse and a 
hearse, and thus enable him to have a monopoly of 



462 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

the undertaking business in his native town. Another 
wanted Mr. Beecher to write him a lecture, which he 
would commit to memory, and then go out and aston- 
ish the people with it. One woman had lost two 
husbands, and had not the means to put up a grave- 
stone for the last. She begged Mr. Beecher to give 
her the money for one, as she expected to marry in a 
few weeks, and wanted this done before her third 
marriage." ' 

" One wanted three thousand dollars to lift the 
mortgage from his farm. A clergyman, in distress, 
asked for a thousand, saying the Lord would re- 
pay it."' 

His house was besieged from morning until night 
with men, women, and children, singly and in groups, 
with requests for the use of his name or counsel, for 
money, for help in finding a friend lost in the city, for 
work, for attendance at a funeral, for religious con- 
versation, and so on, month after month. Dr. E. F. 
Williams and Dr. Goodwin, of Chicago, were talking 
with him after the great Chicago fire, and speaking 
of the lack of economy in the denominational work 
among the Congregationalists. The union of some 
of the theological seminaries was advocated. One of 
them said: " There is Hartford Seminary, it ought to 
be taken to San Francisco." " Yes," said Mr. 
Beecher, quick as a flash, " take it by the way of Cape 
Horn!" 

It is estimated that during his forty years in 
Brooklyn, Mr. Beecher earned, with pen and voice, 
nearly a million and a half of dollars. A very large 

' Mrs. Beecher, Ladies' Home Journal, May, 1892, 
2 " Biography," p. 656. 



''this was a man." 463 

portion of this was given away. Rev. Dr. Frank 
Russell has written: "The impression is prevalent 
that Mr. Beecher's life was one of singular charity 
and generosity, and in this regard he was probably 
susceptible to every imposition. I have seen him 
hand money to those asking for alms, or calling at 
his door with pitiful tales of distress, in amounts 
which I silently thought were far too large for the 
occasion. The remark was common among those 
who knew of the circumstances, when his apparently 
large salary was the theme of the conversation, that 
it made very little difference how much Mr. Beecher 
received, for he would give it all away but his living, 
and his family had to watch pretty closely to get 
that. " ' 

" He supported a large and growing family; he 
divided generously with his relatives by birth and 
marriage; he gave liberally during the war; he made 
constant contributions to deserving societies when 
collections were taken up in his church; he loaned 
money as cheerfully as he gave a glass of water; he 
bought his house on Columbia Heights; he bought a 
farm in Peekskill, and he erected and paid for a resi- 
dence on that farm at a gross cost.of one hundred 
and fifty thousand dollars."^ 

Few men have ever lived who were so resolute to 
return good for evil as Mr. Beecher. He was always 
kind to the newspaper men, from whom he suffered so 
much. A famous college president having published 
a discourteous, condemnatory letter about Mr. 
Beecher, one of Mr. Beecher's friends replied to it in 

' Howard's "Life of Beecher," p. 503. 
^ Howard's " Life of Beecher." 



464 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

words of rebuke. Afterwards he told Mr. Beecher of 

tliis event, and said: " I hear that President is 

having considerable trouble with the students at his 
college, and I am glad of it. I hope he will have so 
much of it that he will have to leave." But Mr. 
Beecher answered: " Oh, no; you should feel just the 
opposite; you should always feel sorry for any one in 
trouble. I know President , and know the diffi- 
culty he is in just now, and had thought of writing 
him, and expressing my regret, and the hope that it 
would soon be over." 

Probably no man of our generation has been more 
disliked and criticised by ministers. Mr. Beecher 
well knew it. As a result he stood very much by him- 
self. " But I have never felt any bitterness toward 
those who regarded me with disfavor. And I speak 
the truth when I declare that I do not remember of 
having, toward any minister, a feeling that I would 
have been afraid to have God review on the Judg- 
ment Day." ^ 

" During the great trial a brother clergyman 
brought to him the sympathies of many friends at 
the West, saying, ' I suppose that you get so many 
of these expressions that they begin to seem of little 
value.* Mr. Beecher then, with an evidently un- 
shaken spirit, replied, * When they come I receive 
them gladly and gratefully; when they do not come 
I am not discouraged or depressed. Tell those 
Western friends that I stand here like a cedar on 
Mount Lebanon.' " " 

Mr. Pratt, in his " Reminiscences," says: " On the 

' " Men of Our Times," p. 574. 

2 Letter from Mr. C. H. A. Bulkley, Washington, D. C. 



"this was a man." 465 

Sabbath, when riding with Mr. Beecher to Professor 
Swing's church, the conversation turned upon the 
great trial and sorrow of his life. I said to him that 
it seemed to me as if, in his time, the right and truth 
would appear, and that my wife, with a woman's in- 
tuition, had said to me, but a day or two before, that 
she felt quite sure he would live to see that time, and 
had also expressed the opinion that there must be 
some great purpose in God's dealing thus with one of 
His servants; but he said he did not hope for it, nor 
expect it; that he expected to live for the remainder of 
his life under a cloud; that it was God's will concern- 
ing his life, and he was resigned to it. He said that 
some great purpose there must be, indeed, in permit- 
ting such a calamity and such great suffering. He 
said that words could not express, and no one could 
know, the bitterness of such a trial. He told me then 
that, ever since the beginning of the trouble until 
now, he had never renewed, or sought to renew, an 
acquaintance or former friendship. In all cases he 
had waited for others to make the advances, and he 
spoke of the inexpressible trial it was to him, whose 
friends had been mj'^riad, to take such a position as 
this, bcause of the calamity that had befallen him, — 
innocent — and engaged in a sincere and earnest effort 
to help and to save others. His words and his man- 
ner were such that they impressed me wonderfullv, 
and it seemed as if it were impossible to endure it. I 
could not understand, as all his friends could not, the 
mystery of God's dealing with him." 

Frequent reference has been made to what has been 
called the " morbid streak " in his nature. His father 
had lived for years after the failure of his mental 
30 



466 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

powers, and Mr. Beecher, although not usually 
given to borrowing trouble, feared that mental failure 
might come to him at last. He talked a good deal 
about sending in his resignation to Plymouth Church. 
On one occasion, while in England, in 1886, his wife 
asked for the letter of resignation, which he carried 
in his pocket, and requested from him a promise that 
he would never write another like it. He gave her 
the letter and she tore it in pieces and tossed it into 
the fire. 

He was happy with children and made them happy. 
He used mild means in training his own children. 
When the offenses, however, were those of meanness, 
falsehood, cruelty, or dishonesty, he could punish with 
great earnestness and severity. He always continued 
his love of simple pleasures, the sports of children, 
the delight of exercise, marbles, swimming, sliding on 
the ice-fields. " He was always the youngest member 
of his family, always the most sympathetic friend of 
his boys and his daughter." " In April, 1883," says Mr. 
Pratt in his " Reminiscences," " I arranged an enter- 
tainment at my house for my children, one of a series, 
and had a little programme printed. One of these I 
sent to Mr. Beecher not expecting to hear from him. 
In a few days I received the following: 

Brooklyn, April 27, 1883. 

My Dear Mr. Pratt — Instead of going out under Pond's 
care hereafter, I am thinking of organizing a company of my 
own, and I am looking out for material. 

I notice a new movement in Chicago which I wish you would 
inquire into and give me a report. It seems like a concert 
troupe, headed by Ned and Mamie Pratt; at any rate they are 
set forth as managers. I would like you to find out : 



"this was a man.' 467 

I. Is this a moral and instructive combination, equal on 
emergency, to Barnum's in educational benefit? 

II. At what price could I engage them for one season? 

III. Would the expenses on the road, of the party, be large ? 
Are they good travelers, easy to manage, good eaters, and 
generally respectable? 

As this will be my first season out as an Operatic and Gen- 
eral Manager, it is important that I make no mistake . 

Yours sincerely, 

Henry Ward Beecher. 

' In 1859 he bought a farm in Peekskill on the Hud- 
son. Here he built a model country home, after 
making careful studies for several years. In the 
building of this home, which he called " Boscobel," 
he found great relief for his much-worried mind. 
The Peekskill Farm is the scene of much of his best 
life. " God alone knows the prayers, the thanks- 
givings in untroubled days, or self-consecration and 
submission to his Father's will in days of trial, which 
found their way up to his Saviour from the innumer- 
able secluded spots which he found on that dear old 
Hillside Rest." ' 

Few men were fitted to enjoy country life like 
Mr. Beecher. " Boscobel," his new house at Peeks- 
kill, was entered in 1878, and became ultimately his 
permanent residence. " None outside of the family 
will ever know to how many ' Boscobel ' was a veri- 
table tower of refuge in dark days and troubled 
times ; how many found inspiration there for greater 
work and increased courage for burden-bearing."'* 



' Mrs. Beecher, in Ladies' Home Journal, 1892. 
'" Biography," p. 632. 



468 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

His thirty-six acres were laid out with great care 
and planted with over sixteen hundred varieties of 
trees and shrubs. He raised Ayrshire and, later, 
Jersey, cows. The farm was well stocked with flowers 
and bees and dogs. 

He w^as an expert and enthusiastic player of the 
game of croquet. His fondness for horses, and for 
fast horses, is well-known. He drove them fearlessly 
and with great skill. He was a great lover of books 
and the desire to buy them, as with many other 
bibliomaniacs, was a serious source of temptation and 
the cause of good-natured domestic trouble. " When 
is human nature so weak and helpless as in a book- 
store ? The appetite for drink cannot be half so 
great as the temptations which beset a book-lover in 
a large and richly furnished bookstore." ^ 

He was a frequent visitor at the Old Corner Book- 
store in Boston. One day he was looking over a 
pile of twenty or thirty volumes, all of them Lives 
of Christ, including Strauss's, Renan's, Beecher's, 
and others, when Mr. Beecher spoke of his own as 
"the poorest in the whole collection." " * Farrar's 
Life,' " he said, " is worth more than all the rest put 
together." 

His house was filled with engravings, and he made 
it an art gallery for his own cultivation and that of 
his children and friends. " It was a rare day at 
Dresden when we were shut up all day alone in the 
Hall of Engravings, and had a taste of the rarest and 
choicest bits of every school and period." The 
names of scores of the more important works in his 



* Mrs. Beecher, in Ladies' Home Journal, May, 1892. 



" THIS WAS A MAN." 469 

library, including Boydell's " Plates to Shakespeare," 
Baillie's " Engravings After the Old Masters," an 
imperial folio containing impressions of " Hogarth's 
Works," Holbein's "Court of Henry VIH.," Jerdan's 
" National Portrait Gallery," Spence's " Polymetis," 
with plates by Bortard and others, have been pub- 
lished. 

He is said to have been a good judge of the com- 
parative merits of impressions, and among the origi- 
nal engravings and etchings which he possessed there 
were Rembrandts, Diirers, Van Dycks, Lucas von 
Leydens, and Van Ostades. He was also the owner 
of paintings by Diaz, Inness, De Haas, J. L. Brown, 
W. Hamilton Gibson and others. It was the opin- 
ion of De Haas that Mr. Beecher's services to the 
cultivation of the beautiful were such as to entitle 
him " to be ranked high in the brotherhood of those 
who see things invisible to the uncultured eye. 
Having the ear of the common people as no other of 
his generation has had, he brought his love of those 
things as an offering to God, and Art in his teaching 
became the handmaiden of religion." ^ 

His fondness for jewels is well known. He was a 
great student of gems, and used to linger over them, 
refreshing his mind by feasting his eyes on their 
brilliant and varied colors. Jewelers entrusted him 
with valuable gems. The opal was his chief favorite. 
" Rubies, amethysts, topazes — all were loved as 
friends, not because of his love for their color, but 
because he seemed to read in them a page of the 
book of nature." His susceptibility to music, his 



*" Beecher Memorial," p. 90. 



470 HENRY WARD HEFXHER. 

delight in melody, are well known. Dr. William 
A. Hammond, of New York, writes: "Some songs, 
especially when sung by women with rich sym- 
pathetic voices, and with the feeling that the sub- 
ject and the music required, never failed to move 
him, and not infrequently to bring tears. I remember 
how upon one occasion he told me, as the piece was 
being played by Thomas's orchestra, that Gounod's 
* Funeral March of a Marionette ' caused in him such 
a mixture of emotions that he did not know whether 
to laugh or to cry." ^ 

He did not agree with the immortal Baillie Nicol 
Jarvie who assured Rob Roy that '* the multiplication 
table is the root of all useful knowledge." Mathe- 
matics was not one of his strong points. He could 
not be trusted with figures, unless they were written 
out. Lawyer Shearman relates an amusing incident 
of Mr. Beecher's helplessness when trying to give 
the exact weight of " Great Tom," the Oxford bell. 
Dr. Talmage discovered that Mr. Beecher was not 
sure of the multiplication table! 

He was a student, eager, delighted, enthusiastic, of 
all the changing moods of the seasons. He was a 
lover of farm-life and found in it his most profitable 
rest. He knew all the birds, and flowers had a won- 
derfully soothing effect on his nerves. Sky-gazing 
quieted his soul. His love of flowers, fruits, and 
farming continued through life. He published many 
essays on these things, and the horticultural allusions 
and figures which might be gathered from his more 
than thirty volumes would fill hundreds of pages. 



^ " Beecher Memorial," p. 85. 



*' THIS WAS A MAN. 47 1 

He was fond of horses, cows, dogs, and hens, and an 
essay on " Cackling " is said to have been the last 
article he ever published. Speaking of dogs he once 
said: " If the dog isn't good for anything else, it is 
good for you to love, and that is a good deal. I have 
two miserable scraggy dogs up at my Peekskill farm. 
They are practically good for nothing, but I some- 
times think that they are worth more to me than the 
whole place." ^ 

What he saw and said about nature was a revela- 
tion to common minds and also a help to special 
students, like John Burroughs. 

No one understands Mr. Beecher's soul who has 
not read the " Star Papers," written from Lenox, 
Mass., in 1854. The heart of Berkshire was never 
more beautifully disclosed. These letters are among 
the classics in the literature of nature. His " Dream 
Culture," " Gone to the Country," " A Walk Among 
Trees " reveal to us a man whom Wordsworth and 
Ruskin would have hailed as a brother. 

A book might be filled with instances of Mr. 
Beecher's wit and humor. He once described an old- 
fashioned sewing-circle: "You know," he said, " that 
a company of ladies get together, and they sew up 
their collars and they sew up their neighbors (accom- 
panying the words by illustrating with his hand as 
if sewing) ; in fact, it is a sort of sew-cial cannibalism." ^ 

At the close of the pew-renting in Plymouth 
Church, a friend said to him, " Mr. Beecher, I have 
been trying all the evening to get a seat and have not 



' Knox's " Life of Beecher," p. 499. 
^ " Life," pp. 193-194. 



472 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

succeeded." To which Mr. Beecher replied, " AVell, 
then, you must fulfill the apostolic injunction, and 
having done all to stand'' * 

At the close of Mr. Beecher's sermon in 1882, in the 
First Presbyterian Church, Chicago, a member of the 
congregation, a gentleman of great wealth, an intense 
admirer of Mr. Beecher, came up to him and said: 
*' Fifteen years ago I loaned you a dime for fare on 
the ferry," and to this Mr. Beecher replied: " I hope 
you have not come to dun me for it now! " 

No man relished a good social time with his friends 
more than Mr. Beecher. ** In 1883," says Mr. Pratt, in 
his " Reminiscences," " when on a visit to New York, 
I enjoyed the last opportunity I ever had to hear Mr. 
Beecher preach in his own pulpit. I went to Ply- 
mouth Church in the morning, and at the close of 
the service stood not far from the pulpit, waiting for 
the people to withdraw, so I could speak to Mr. 
Beecher. Seeing me, he beckoned to me, and said: 
* Pratt, I am glad to see you; you must go home to 
dinner with me to-day, or there will be a funeral in 
your father's family,' and I was glad to accept the 
invitation. Before leaving, Mr. Beecher showed me 
the various telephones that were attached to the 
pulpit desk, one reaching to Newark, one to Elizabeth, 
one to Orange, and, I believe, one or two into Brook- 
lyn houses, and one or two into New York, so that 
his sermon was heard by persons at these various 
points every Sunday. As we stood at the church 
door for a moment, Mr. and Mrs. Beecher, Moses 
Beach and his wife, and myself, conversing, a very 

'•'Life," p. 193. 



" THIS WAS A MAN. 473 

plain and plainly-dressed young man came up, and, 
without speaking, handed Mr. Beecher a small pack- 
age and walked away. Mr. Beecher looked at it 
curiously, and remarked that, perhaps, it contained 
dynamite, and would blow us ail up; however, he said 
we would all go together if it was, and he opened 
the package. It contained, in a small piece of paper, 
a nickel, and on the scrap of paper was written: ' Mr. 
Beecher, I heard your sermon this morning, and I 
want to be that kind of a Christian.' Mr. Beecher 
remarked that it was a humble and pleasant tribute." 

" At dinner he was very jovial and entertaining. 
Though it was Sunday, he and I fell to telling stories, 
and after a little while Mr. Beecher looked up and 
said: * Eunice, what makes you keep punching me so 
for ? Pratt and I want to have a good time.' ' Well,' 
she said, ' I want you to behave yourselves; it is Sun- 
day.' ' My dear,' he answered, ' I wish you would let 
me alone.' I recall that Sunday visit with Mr. 
Beecher with the greatest pleasure always. Before I 
left he took me to his various studies, and showed me 
his libraries, the desk where he wrote his sermons, 
various pictures of himself," etc. 

Mr. Pratt has some amusing reminiscences of Mr. 
Beecher's meeting with common people. ''That night 
we remained at Racine, and the next morning were 
detained for an hour or two, waiting about the hotel 
office. There were a number of countrymen loung- 
ing about the office, and one of them came up to me 
and said, ' Is that Mr. Beecher?' I told him it was. 
* Is it Henry Ward Beecher?' 'It is.' 'Can I 
speak to him ?' I said, 'You can, no doubt.' ' Well, 
how shall I do it ? ' I replied, ' Why go right up 



474 HENRV WARD BF-ECKER. 

and speak to him, as you would to any one else.* 
* What will he do?' he asked, I told him that he 
would do what any one else would, and would answer 
him pleasantly. So he went up timidly and spoke to 
Mr. Beecher, and very soon they were engaged in 
earnest conversation, Mr. Beecher finding that this 
man was the son of one of his old parishioners at 
Indianapolis. I told Mr. Beecher of the man's ques- 
tions and he remarked: * I suppose he thought that 
if he spoke to me I would explode.' 

" A man approached Mr. Beecher on the train 
and in a very pompous manner reached out his 
hand and said: 'This is Henry Ward Beecher, I 
believe?' Mr. Beecher replied in the affirmative, 
and the man said, ' Well, Mr. Beecher, fifteen years 
ago I shook hands with you in Michigan.' 'Well,' 
said Mr. Beecher, * did it hurt you any ?' " 

Mr. Beecher wrote his own letters, though the bus- 
iness correspondence was turned over to his wife. He 
was punctilious in answering letters, sometimes giv- 
ing a whole morning to the correspondence which had 
accumulated, but, unfortunately for him, he did not 
learn to use any of the modern devices for lessening 
the toil of the letter-writer. As an illustration of his 
care in answering inquiries from strangers, the follow- 
ing reply to questions about the duty of personal 
conversation with the unconverted will be of interest: 

Peekskill, N. Y., ) 
July 17, 1884. \ 

Dear Sir — This is vacation, and I am trying to answer some 
of the letters which have accumulated on my hands. 

There are some who have the gift of easy approach and con- 
versation with men respecting their religious experience and 



"this was a man. 475 

condition. They can do it easily, spontaneously, effectively. 
Others are not so skillful, and do more harm than good. In the 
Apostles' day there were gifts (see I. Cor. 12), and one did not 
attempt to exercise the other's gifts. In some way a Christian 
man should let it be known (rather by his conduct than by his 
speech) that he is a follower of Christ. 

As a teacher, one may have opportunity to give his class 
together a word of exhortation. Again, there come times 
when a single sentence may be dropped, or one may be so full 
of some experience that a friend might obviously wish a con- 
versation. The whole thing may be left to one's common sense, 
provided his heart is filled with love and his whole life pene- 
trated with a sense of Eternal truth. But an empty heart is 
not improved by chattering lips. 

Do not intrude on men in a professional spirit, because it is 
the cant of the times. A doctor should not be inquisitive of 
every man's health whom he meets, and yet should be ready at 
all times to aid the sick, and so of lawyers, and so of ministers. 
It may be said that the soul is of more importance than the 
body, and that it is in peril every hour. Even so, experience 
shows that an intrusive conversation is not the best way of in- 
fluencing it. One should be himself filled with the Spirit before 
he seeks to inspire. A routine Christian, talking to every one, 
because he thinks it to be his duty, is little better than a pair of 
bellows, puffing in winter in hopes of bringing on spring. 

Henry Ward Beecher. 

To Charles Beecher Holdrege, President of the Illinois 
State Christian Endeavor Society. 

He was at heart a Puritan, a true lineal descendant 
of that " earnest-eyed race, stiff from long wrestling 
with the Lord in prayer, who had taught Satan to 
dread the new Puritan hug." But as a loyal Puritan 
he set his face toward the future. He followed the 
spirit which led him across many a stormy sea, 
into new lands, into new continents of truth. And 



47^ HENRY WAPD LEECHER. 

though he could preach righteousness like a prophet 
of old Jerusalem, lie became more and more imbued 
with the sunshine of the Gospel. Many of his best 
friends felt that toward the last his great heart 
preached the love of God too continuously, and that 
his charity overpassed the bounds of truth. He cer- 
tainly became something less of a Puritan in his ideas 
of popular amusements. In his later years he modi- 
fied his attitude toward the theater, and became 
acquainted in a most friendly way with some of the 
greater actors. 

Has any other man touched our National life at so 
many points? President Cleveland has written of 
him: "An honorable pride in American citizenship, 
guided by the teachings of religion, he believed to be 
a sure guaranty of a splendid National destiny. I 
never met Mr. Beecher without gaining something 
from his broad views and wide reflections." * 

" Like Lincoln, he stood on many occasions for in- 
carnate common sense. " ^ 

But although he touched the common life, and 
the higher life, of the Nation at every point of the 
horizon, no one can read the story of his career 
without feeling that his truest life was hid with 
Christ in God. A trusted friend has written of him; 
" He always felt, and sometimes expressed, a deep 
sense of loneliness in his highest nature."^ 

But in that loneliness he knew Divine companion- 
ship, and with the help of his redeeming God, he was 



* " Beecher Memorial," p. 27. 

^ George W. Childs, " Beecher Memorial," p. 38. 

^Thomas G, Shearman, " Memorial Service," p. 23. 



" THIS WAS A MAN. 477 

able to battle for truth and righteousness to the very- 
end, leaving a name that shall inspire the generous 
youth of coming generations. What Eliza Reimarus 
wrote, as at the grave of the noblest of German au- 
thors, may well be repeated by those who shall stand 
above the sod in Greenwood which covers what was 
mortal of Henry Ward Beecher: 

*' I am the truth! And here is Lessing's grave 
As suns go down, so sank he to his rest. 
In fullest splendor, and lights other worlds. 
Yet as the sun, in his eternal course, 
The seed-corn opens, which with thousand fruits, 
Its blessings scatters to infinitude. 
So he, too, in my realm. And till this realm 
In God's wide universe shall be but one, 
I watch here by his urn, and gather in 
The oaths of those who him their brother called, 
And know that myriads on myriads 
Are scattered now in every land 
To arm themselves against you and your power. 
Yet ye, who mourn around your Lessing's dust, 
If all your tears are not to be grimaces. 
Then swear in earnest, on his ashes, swear 
For truth and manhood's sacred right, like him, 
In spite of Prejudice, and Prince, and Priest, 
With dauntless heroism still to fight. 
Till God shall call you to the realm of truth." 



CHAPTER XLVI. 

THE ELOQUENT ORATOR. 

There is no doubt that the oratorical achievements 
of Henry Ward Beecher are among the most splendid 
in the history of the century. His oratorical genius 
was shown in the pulpit, on the platform, before 
popular assemblies stirred with political excitement, 
in the presence of mobs, in the hall of debate, and in 
familiar conversation. He was very unequal, and men 
might hear him in one of his quiet lectures, when he 
scarcely lifted his voice above a conversational tone, 
and get but the faintest conception of the slumbering 
powers, which, when evoked by some great theme or 
some great occasion that stirred his emotions, electri- 
fied and overawed his astonished listeners. Referring 
to his oratory. Dr. Cuyler finely says: '* Of his mar- 
velous charms of eloquence, I need no more write 
than of the grandeur of Handel's oratorios. It was 
something to dream about. His voice was as sweet as 
a lute and as loud as a trumpet. In its tenderest 
pathos, that witching voice touched the fount of 
tears. When he rose into impassioned sublimity, 
'they that heard him said that it thundered.' " ^ 

When touched by the heroic, or roused to sym- 



^ " Beecher Memorial," p. 42. 



THE ELOQUENT ORATOR. 479 

pathy for the suffering, Mr. Beecher's eloquence 
poured forth in a fiery tide. After going through the 
Soldiers' Home at Dayton, Ohio, and speaking kind 
words to the sick veterans, he addressed these wards 
of the Republic " with an eloquence," writes Gen. 
Horatio C. King, " which I have never seen equaled. 
They were held spellbound, and before he closed 
there was not a dry eye in that assembly of at least a 
thousand men, varying in age from forty to sixty 
years. . . . And when he attempted to pass 
through the crowd, they rushed to him to grasp his 
hand and poured forth their thanks until Mr. Beecher, 
himself almost overcome with emotion, was compelled 
to break away." ^ 

An old minister, who for many years had lived in a 
Western town, has said: "The great sensation of the 
season to the rustics who go not out much into the 
great world has been the advent of Mr. Beecher and 
the pleasure of hearing him speak. We have seen the 
lion and heard him roar, and at times he would roar 
you as ' gently as a sucking dove,' but would soon as- 
sert his lionhood by coming out with his tremendous 
basso-profundo. His lecture was a splendid sermon, 
much of it occupied with splendid interpretations of 
the Scripture and some of it with * that elder Scripture 
writ by God's own hand,' in the constitution of man. 
He is not an imposing presence. There is a good 
deal of the Little Corporal about him, especially in 
his power to wield men. But I feel glad and grateful 
for the privilege of hearing him, and think all who 
have listened to him must have marked that sure 



Knox's " Life of Beecher," pp. 344-345. 



480 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

characteristic of genius that it prompts them to 
higher achievements in whatever may be their line of 
work." 

Mr. Beecher should be studied as a great master of 
oratorical style. He got his English from the very 
best sources. He never affected the colorless sim- 
plicity, the simple clearness, which has no beauty in 
it, practiced and applauded by some of the writers and 
conversational speakers of our time. He could be as 
conversational as Phillips, and surely no style is less 
artificial than his, but his words were the expression 
of his own abounding mental and moral life. He 
could be simple with the simplest, and ornate and 
imaginative with the great masters of English, like 
Milton and Burke. 

His vocabulary is remarkably rich, and though he 
was a preacher for the common people, we find him 
employing at times quite a number of unusual, tech- 
nical, or obsolescent words, such as *' impudicity," 
" cacophonous," " incontradictible," " unsworded," 
"rugosities," "sinuosities," " vespertilian," "fuligi- 
nous," "basilar," " dismayful," "disbranched," etc. 
Mr. Beecher wrote English, purest English, and very 
rarely do we find him using any Latin or French 
expression. It is almost startling to stumble across 
anything in him so simple as " arriere pensee." This 
is not quite like Mr. Lowell's " Mississippi boatman 
quoting Tennyson," although it gives the reader a 
queer and humorous shock. 

" Mr. Beecher," said his admiring friend. Dr. 
Parker, "had a supreme gift of language as was 
betokened by his planet-like eyes, eyes as full as 
Shakespeare's, as radiant as Gladstone's, as expressive 



THE ELOQUENT ORATOR. 481 

as Garrick's. In the use of words he was a necro- 
mancer." ^ 

He poured forth, in the height of his emotion, his 
rushing sentences with such velocity at times that, 
not infrequently, he was as careless of grammatical 
propriety and construction as was the Apostle Paul 
in the glow and impetuosity of his epistles. 

His popular lectures were on such themes as " The 
Ministry of the Beautiful," " The Uses of Wealth," 
" Amusements," " The Reign of the Common Peo- 
ple," "Conscience," "Evolution not Revolution," 
" The Burdens of Society," " A Journey Across the 
Continent," " Character." Among his more note- 
worthy addresses in later life were those given at the 
Parnell Reception Meeting, the Centennial Address 
at Peekskill, the Address before the Army of the Po- 
tomac in 1878, at the Channing Memorial Service in 
1880, at the Garfield Ratification Meeting in 1880, 
and the Eulogy on General Grant delivered in Tre- 
mont Temple, Boston. One of his best addresses 
was that on " Preaching " which he delivered before 
the Evangelical Alliance in New York in 1873. " He 
spoke," said Dr. Schaff, " like a king from his throne," 
and it was on occasions like this, when the creative 
powers of his mind were at work in all their miracu- 
lous quickness and force that Mr. Beecher showed 
what was in him. 

In immediate impressiveness he has been equaled 
by no American of this century. The charm of Phil- 
lips's oratory will dwell longer in the delighted mem- 
ories of the scholarly and refined. Phillips's presence 



* " Eulogy," p. 16. 
31 



482 HENRY WARD EEECHER. 

had more classic dignity, and he captured the imagi- 
nation of the hero-worshiper more completely. But, 
standing on the soil of common manhood, sharing 
more fully the general thought and life of the people, 
Mr. Beecher, with his far greater physical earnestness 
and emotional intensity, easily stirred a great audi- 
ence more profoundly even than Wendell Phillips. 
With his hearty good nature and overflowing humor, 
he was able to say his severest things without giving 
deep offense. " Men will let you abuse them," he 
said, "if you will only make them laugh." * 

Although, perhaps, not the greatest, he was yet the 
most successful of American lecturers, addressing 
larger audiences with greater pecuniary rewards 
than any other speaker. His editorial writing at its 
best had the same qualities with his most fiery public 
addresses. Mr. Beecher is justly deemed one of the 
two or three greatest editors that America has ever 
produced. He carried into his editorial work the 
rush and inspirational power which gave such vigor 
to his best oratory. He was not an editor who at- 
tended to the details of journalism, but he wrote with 
fury, at the last moment, what was uppermost in his 
mind, and his leaders in The Independent^ it has truly 
been said, have never had their equal in kindling 
force in American journalism. The Christian Union, 
under his touch, sprang up into an unparalleled 
growth, reaching in a short time a circulation of more 
than one hundred and thirty thousand. Lyman Ab- 
bott, one of the best known religious journalists in 
America, has said: " His editorial influence will never 



^ " Eyes and Ears," p. 59. 



THE ELOQUENT ORATOR. 483 

cease to be felt in the larger charity, the broader views 
of life, and the greater independence of thought which 
he, as much perhaps as any living man, has helped to 
impart to American journalism." ' 

On his lecture tours he was in charge of his agent 
and he had no cares on his mind. " But for such 
faithful supervision, Mr. Beecher could not have 
accomplished half what he did in that line. From the 
hour that he left for a lecturing trip until his return, 
he was as free from thought or anxiety about his 
work as a child." ^ 

Innumerable stories have been told of his power of 
quick reply. At the farewell banquet given to Herbert 
Spencer on the 9th of November, 1882, Mr. Beecher 
was urged to do something to wake up the distin- 
guished company, who had been rendered somnolent 
by rather heavy speeches. " Mr. Beecher did wake 
them up effectually by a magnificent speech, which 
roused the utmost enthusiasm. Dr. Hammond, the 
well-known Surgeon-General of the Army during the 
war, strode up to him, and in a voice which resounded 
through the hall, said: * Mr. Beecher. you are the 
greatest man in America, sir.' Mr. Beecher instantly 
replied, with a reproachful air: ' Dr. Hammond, you 
forget yourself.' " ^ 

Charles Dudley Warner, having heard one of the 
Yale Lectures on Preaching, and listened to his replies 
to the pointed inquiries of the students, thought that 
Mr. Beecher's mental alertness and unexpectedness. 



» " Life," pp. 132-133. 

^ Mrs. Beecher, Ladies' Home journal, June, 1892. 

' "Memorial Service," p. 32. 



4^4 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

his quick-flashing wit, and his subtle humor, furnished 
a display of intellectual brilliancy hardly to be 
matched.' 

At the close of his first Yale Lecture he was asked 
if he would not preach a fair proportion of educating 
sermons, and he instantly replied: "Men in the or- 
dinary stage are like robins' eggs in the nest; you 
cannot feed them. Let the robins sit on them a little 
while and by and by there will be nothing but four 
mouths, and as fast as you put in worms they will 
gulp them. To educate man in the cold and natural 
state is just like feeding eggs. Warm them and give 
them life, and they will eat." 

He was lecturing on *' Communism " in the old 
Wigwam in Chicago, before an audience of ten 
thousand people. Everybody was subdued; the 
audience was breathless with interest. " He was tell- 
ing the story of the rise of the power of the people. 
Presently he ended a ringing period with these words, 
pronounced in a voice so deep and fervid and full of 
conviction that they seemed to have been uttered 
then for the first time, ' The voice of the people is the 
voice of God.' " But into the silence which followed 
this utterance came the voice of a half-drunken man 
in the gallery: " The voice of the people is the voice 
of a fool." Would Mr. Beecher be equal to such an 
interruption which made the sympathetic crowd 
shiver ? He certainly was, for, looking toward the gal- 
lery from whence the voice came, he replied with simple 
dignity: "I said the voice of the people, not the 
voice of one man." The response from the audience 



* *• Beecher Memorial," pp. 74-75. 



THE ELOQUENT ORATOR. 485 

was a sigh of happy relief rather than an explosion of 
laughter; but there was so much electric sympathy 
throughout the Wigwam that an outburst was wait- 
ing only for an occasion. And when the drunken 
fellow staggered to his feet and mumbled something 
unintelligible, Mr. Beecher paused again, and with 
his winning, half reproachful smile, said: "Will some 
kind person take our friend out and give him some 
cold water — plenty of it — within and without." "As 
two policemen took the disturber away, the tabernacle 
shook with cheers. They supposed they were cheer- 
ing Mr. Beecher's wit, instead of that tremendous 
power which no one need try to analyze." ^ 

Mr. Pond thinks the most remarkable speech of 
Beecher's life, was given in Richmond, Virginia, in 
1877. The city was excited, and circulars were issued 
denouncing Henry Ward Beecher after the style of 
the Liverpool posters in 1863. Anti-Beecher poetry 
was sold by the newsboys on the street. The people 
were urged not to hear such a man^ but, expecting 
some excitement, the house was filled with a noisy 
crowd. Mr. Pond introduced Mr. Beecher who was 
greeted with applause and yells. The members of 
the Legislature were present. Mr. Beecher spoke on 
" Hard Times" and said, in his first sentence, that 
there was a law of God, a common^ and natural law, 
that brains and money controlled the universe. He 
said: "This law cannot be changed even by a big 
Virginia Legislature which opens with prayer and 
closes with benediction." As the law-makers were 
there, the laugh went around and soon the house was 



^ Knox's " Life of Beecher," pp. 340-341. 



486 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

applauding. Mr. Beecher eulogized Virginia as a 
commonwealth who bred her sons for Presidents, and 
when he had wrought up his audience with enthu- 
siasm, he exclaimed: ** But what a change when she 
came to breeding her sons for the marketT' For two 
hours and a half the lecture went on. Once in his 
room at the hotel Mr. Beecher sat back in his chair 
and laughed, Mr. Pond remarks, as much as to say, 
" We have captured Richmond, haven't we?" Many- 
Richmond notables knocked at his door that night and 
tried to persuade Mr. Beecher to give another lec- 
ture. This was impossible, but the people came in 
crowds the next morning at seven o'clock to see him 
off.^ 

Mr. Beecher appears to the least advantage in the 
oratory of memorial occasions, when protracted re- 
search, clearness, and accuracy of statement, long- 
brooding thoughtfulness and care, logical arrange- 
ment and historical imagination, and a conscientious 
enthusiasm for literary perfection, like thatof Thucy- 
dides and Macaulay, work together to produce such 
masterpieces as Lowell's Harvard address, some of 
the discourses of Professor Park, several of the ora- 
tions of Edward Everett, George William Curtis, 
Ex-Governor John D. Long, and Senator George F. 
Hoar, and, conspicuously, the greater efforts of Dr. 
Richard S. Storrs. Compared with Dr. Storrs's Phi 
Beta Kappa address at Harvard, his Wycliffe oration 
and his sermon at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 
American Board, Mr. Beecher's more elaborate written 
speeches appear rhetorically crude. His genius 



» •• Life," pp. 155-157. 



THE ELOQUENT ORATOR. 487 

worked habitually and most effectively in another 
way. Eloquence, with him, was a sudden, fiery in- 
spiration, kindling his gathered materials into a 
rhetorical illumination, which, if not always seen at 
its highest glow, was sometimes more startling and 
marvelous than the deliberate and premeditated elo- 
quence of other men. 

It is hard to imagine Shakespeare correcting and 
polishing his plays, and it is almost equally hard to im- 
agine Beecher combing the locks of his speeches, wash- 
ing their faces, and straightening their clothes, in order 
to make the most presentable appearance to posterity. 
Furthermore, Mr. Beecher was so continually called 
upon to stand and deliver his thought, that he may 
be said never to have had time for that ceremonial 
eloquence so delightful to the more cultivated Amer- 
ican people. 

But, though it was not his to be great in every 
form of oratory, he surpassed others in the highest 
forms. His one speech, delivered in five parts before 
the English people, in 1863, is doubtless the grandest 
speech of the nineteenth century. It will bear and 
repay the most careful analysis and most pro- 
longed study. Out of the materials gathered, and 
the convictions matured by many years of study, 
it sprang into life under the pressure of a great 
opportunity. 

Speaking from his pulpit at an earlier time, as the 
voice of outraged humanity condemning the Fugi- 
tive Slave Bill, there flashed forth these words: " I 
would die myself, cheerfully and easily, before a man 
should be taken out of my hands, when I had the 
power to give him liberty, and the hound was after 



4^8 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

him for his blood. I would stand as an altar of ex- 
piation between slavery and liberty, knowing that, 
through my example, a million men would live. A he- 
roic deed, in which one yields up his life for others, is 
his Calvary. It was the hanging of Christ on that hill- 
top that made it tlie highest mountain on the globe. 
Let a man do a right thing with such earnestness 
that he counts his life of little value, and his example 
becomes omnipotent. Therefore it is said that the 
blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. 
There is no such seed planted in this world as good 
blood!" In quoting this passage, Washington 
Gladden writes: *' It is impossible for me to give any 
indication of the power with which these words were 
spoken. It seemed as if the very walls quivered with 
the intensity of the feeling. In the crowded church 
men's eyes were blazing, and their chests were heav- 
ing, and tears were falling on the pale cheeks of 
women; it was one of those exalted moments that do 
not often visit us on this earth." ^ 

Even when Mr. Beecher was far less than his great- 
est, his eloquence, with voice and pen, was one of the 
potent forces for the elevation of his countrymen. 
We rightly think of him during forty years of his 
life as the voice of the nobler sentiment of America, 
appealing for justice and humanity. *' His pulpit 
moved around in the daily press, and was on the 
banks of the Ohio and the Missouri, while, as the old 
Scottish clan sprang forth from the bushes when their 
chieftain gave a blast on his trumpet, the audiences 
of this evangelist issued at his call from all the hills 



Beecher Memorial," p. 91. 



THE ELOQUENT ORATOR. 489 

of the East and the waving grass of the West. The 
public services of Daniel Webster did not cover 
so wide a space of time, nor did the great career 
of Abraham Lincoln take in so many circles of the 
sun."' 



* Prof. David Swing, " Beecher Memorial," pp. 34-35. 



CHAPTER XLVII. 

HE PREACHED CHRIST. 

A VOLUME might easily be written on Henry Ward 
Beecher as the most powerful and famous preacher 
of the nineteenth century. Professor Phelps has 
said: " The best test of a good sermon is the instinct 
of a heterogeneous audience. That is not good 
preaching which is limited in its range of adaptation 
to select audiences. The sermon is in kind the grand- 
est thing in literature, because it sways the mind 
without distinction of class." Few men ever mingled 
" truth and personality " so absolutely as Mr. Beecher, 
He preached Christ as Christ was revealed in his own 
heart. 

One difference between him and Mr. Spurgeon was 
this: Mr. Spurgeon received the truth as a pearl 
of great price, something beautiful, inestimable, 
unchangeable. Mr. Beecher received the truth as a 
seed, vital, germinant, expanding, capable of being 
transformed into higher manifestations. During his 
grand life, Spurgeon was telling with great force of 
language and fervor of feeling, how beautiful, how 
wonderful, was this divine jewel. During his long 
ministry Mr. Beecher was speaking with grateful 
enthusiasm of the Kingdom of God as it was expand- 
ing in his soul and in the world. Spurgeon was the 



HE PREACHED CHRIST. 49I 

greater herald, Beecher was the greater interpreter 
and the mightier witness. Spurgeon preached what 
he received at the start, the Gospel that came to him 
full-orbed and perfect. 

Mr. Beecher was unable to permanently adopt what 
came to him from others. He learned with Robert- 
son that a man must struggle alone; his own view of 
truth and that only will give him rest. He can only 
accept the views of other minds for a time. " I have 
my own peculiar temperament ; I have my own 
method of preaching, and my method and tempera- 
ment necessitate errors. I am not worthy to be 
related in a hundred thousandth degree to those 
happy men who never make a mistake in the pulpit." 
Truth seemed to him not a thing finished, not some- 
thing perfectly revealed, but rather as something yet 
to be attained in its fulness. He was not disposed 
to forget the words of the Apostle, that we know in 
part, and he felt the wisdom of Pascal when he wrote: 
" One may make an idol of truth even, for truth 
without love is not God; it is only His reflection and 
an idol which we ought not to adore." 

Charles H. Spurgeon seemed greater than Mr. 
Beecher, both in service and in spiritual power, to men 
whose convictions led them to the orthodoxy of the 
past. He was a man of granitic faith, and rose at times 
into the spiritual fervor and majesty of one of the He- 
brew prophets. His intellectual resources were large, 
but they belonged to a lower range than Mr. Beecher's. 
The great Englishman was eminently fitted, as a 
thinker and a preacher, to reach and mould the sturdy 
and unimaginative lower classes of his countrymen. 
Mr. Beecher's was a far loftier mind, more daring, 



492 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

more imaginative, and infinitely more fertile in 
ideas. 

George S. Merriman, his associate for a time on the 
Christian U7iio?t, said: " While not naming him, of 
course, with Plato for originality, he was essentially 
of Plato's type in his interpretation of the universe, 
by a lofty impassioned idealism, and the serene light 
of the Athenian sage kindled in the Christian preacher 
into a warmer and tenderer glow." ' 

Spurgeon had great qualities of character which 
Mr. Beecher did not possess. He was preeminent as 
an organizer, a builder of institutions, and into some of 
the mistakes of Mr. Beecher's life he never could have 
fallen. But, on the other hand, Mr. Beecher was a 
leader of leaders, a daring explorer in the world of 
the spirit, a Columbus voyaging over unknown seas 
of thought. He believed in a present inspiration, and 
hence in a growing understanding of God's universe. 
" If his life," said General Fremont, " had been cast in 
Southern Europe or Asia, he would have been a great 
prophet and swayed nations." 

He touched not only the people, but the loftier 
minds. It is reported that " when Charles Kingsley 
heard him he sat and wept like a child through the 
whole discourse, and when it was concluded he said: 
* Mr. Beecher has said the very things I have been 
trying to say ever since I entered the Christian pul- 
pit.'" =^ 

Dr. Howson, the Dean of Chester, who had been 
greatly moved by Mr. Beecher's printed and spoken 
words, sent him from England one of his own books 

^ " Beecher's Personality," John R. Howard, p. 158. 
^ " Beecher's Personality," by John R. Howard, p. 159. 



HE PREACHED CHRIST, 493 

in grateful return for one that Mr. Beecher had pre- 
sented him. It was inscribed: "For gold I give thee 
brass." ' 

The witnesses are legion to the strong influence 
which Mr. Beecher's preaching of the truth of God's 
Fatherhood, had exercised over their minds. Our age 
has been affluent in great or famous preachers — Dean 
Stanley, Canon Liddon, Norman McLeod, Joseph 
Parker, Professor Park, Professor Phelps, Pere Hya- 
cinthe, Dr. Bushnell, John Hall, Dr. CoUyer, Dr. Park- 
hurst, E.H.Chapin,Mr.Punshon, Bersier,Bishop Simp- 
son, the elder Tyng, Archdeacon Farrar, George Dana 
Boardman,WiHiam M.Taylor,DeWitt Talmage, Bishop 
Huntington, Theodore L. Cuyler, Richard S. Storrs, 
Alexander McLaren, and many besides. An elaborate 
comparison and contrast with each one of these would 
show their superiority to Henry Ward Beecher, each 
in some particular excellence, while it would leave his 
preeminence untouched. 

The late Phillips Brooks, the greatest of American 
preachers since the sods of Greenwood received the 
body of one greater still, might be brought into in- 
structive comparison with Henry Ward Beecher. The 
pastor of Trinity Church, Boston, was in some respects 
a more attractive figure than the pastor of Plymouth 
Church, Brooklyn. He shared largely in Mr. Beech- 
er's broad humanity of spirit. In him thought and 
life, intellectual insight and spiritual insight, were 
marvelously commingled. One has truly said: "It was 
his happy gift to predominate like the sun in light and 
heat." Never having passed through the trials and 



" Beecher's Personality," John R. Howard, p. 158. 



494 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

shadows of Mr. Beecher's life, and possessing a certain 
dignity and moral loneliness which Mr. Beecher never 
had, Phillips Brooks gained a hold on the confidence 
and love of many of the more highly educated minds 
of the American people, to an unparalleled degree. 
Though occupying a theological position more ad- 
vanced than Mr. Beecher's, he preached so wisely and 
positively the grand Gospel which he believed, that 
he never excited the wide theological opposition which 
made Plymouth pulpit for many years a storm-center. 
And yet it must be acknowledged that Mr. Beecher 
was the grandest single force ever given to the Ameri- 
can pulpit. In Phillips Brooks there is a higher 
and steadier average of spiritual tone, but it was 
not given to him to rise to Beecher's loftiest heights 
of inspiration. Mr. Beecher touched human life, like 
Shakespeare, at almost every point. He was a man 
of the people, a man among common men, as 
Phillips Brooks was not. Like Lincoln, he had the 
experience of a life of poverty and hardship. He 
possessed that humor and pathos which moved the 
common heart. He was a magnificent force in moral 
reform, a great editor and author, and takes rank 
with our chief statesmen in his influence over politi- 
cal action. Mr. Beecher's sermons have an endless 
freshness and variety. When Phillips Brooks was 
going to preach in Westminster Abbey, a friend once 
asked him what sermon he was about to deliver, and 
he replied: "Sermon? I have but one." By this he 
meant that his message, his peculiar message, his 
personal contribution to the spiritual forces of his 
time, was along only one line. What this was it is 
not difficult to discover. It was a marvelous dis- 



HE PREACHED CHRIST. 495 

closure of the possibilities of human life, because 
man is God's son, because God is man's loving Father. 

Writing of Mr. Beecher, Prof. George B. Will- 
cox once said: " I suppose that is true of him as a 
pulpit orator which never has been true before of any- 
other preacher in this country, and, after his 
departure, it will never be true again. It is this: if, 
in any company of intelligent persons, you should 
speak of the foremost preacher on this continent 
without mentioning his name, nine persons in every 
ten would know whom you meant." ^ 

Abraham Lincoln, Dean Stanley, Mr. Spurgeon, 
Dr. AUon, and many others have remarked the 
Shakespearean quality of Mr. Beecher's intellect, its 
absorbing and transforming power, its vast range and 
versatility, its spontaneity, its comprehensiveness, the 
mysterious electrical force that flashes the light of 
imagination over common things. Dr. Armitage 
wrote of him: " His sermons exhibit a larger reading 
of human nature, a broader use of philosophical 
inquiry, a fresher application of Gospel truths, a 
clearer induction of common sense, and a more inde- 
pendent rectitude, than has fallen to the lot of any 
modern preacher." " My sober impression," said Dr. 
Parker, " is that Mr. Beecher could preach every Sun- 
day in the year from the first verse in Genesis, with- 
out giving any sign of intellectual exhaustion or any 
failure of imaginative force." "^ 

His preaching had a quality so distinct and original 
that it cannot be easily classed with that of any other 
master of pulpit eloquence. It had the peculiarities 



» " Life," p. 388. 2 •. Life," p. 299. 



496 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

of his nature in so marked a degree that he who 
thoroughly knows the Beecher sermon knows Henry- 
Ward Beecher. His whole manhood went into his 
preaching, his spiritual life, his sense of God's love, 
his mental nimbleness, his large view of things, his 
worship of Christ, his passion for righteousness, his 
passion for souls, his broad humanity, his observa- 
tions of nature, his practical philosophy, his powers 
of analysis and of comparison, his observations of 
human life, his prolific imagination, his memories of 
childhood, his recollections of Europe, the incidents 
of his anti-slavery history, his great heart-experiences, 
his sorrows, his consolations in grief, his study of the 
Scriptures, his knowledge of contemporary events in 
National and political life, his wit, his often grotesque 
humor, his tenderness toward the wayward and suf- 
fering, his delight in little children, in flowers, in 
pictures, and in jewels. 

His preaching centered in the great truths of God's 
love revealed in the suffering Christ, who was God 
manifest in the flesh. Grace Greenwood writes that 
coming out of Plymouth Church: " The sun was 
always shining for me whatever the weather."^ Men 
heard him not as a dying man to dying men 
but, as Dr. Holmes has said, " as a living man to liv- 
ing men." 

The great-hearted temperance reformer, Mr. Francis 
Murphy, who has brought the power of love so 
mightily to the sorely-tempted and fallen, writes: 

" I think it one of the greatest blessings of my life 
that I have had the pleasure of a personal acquaint- 



* " Beecher Memorial," p. 43. 



HE PREACHED CHRIST. 497 

ance with the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. I have met 
him frequently and have spoken on the same platform 
with him. His loving, tender, Christlike ministry has 
been a constant inspiration and blessing to me. He 
introduced the World's Redeemer to publicans and 
sinners. His beautiful pictures of the infinite love of 
Jesus Christ were so much stronger than the power 
of sin that people willingly accepted of the Gospel of 
redeeming love. I remember him as a great light. 
His words were like drops of gentle rain. Wherever 
he was, it was summer. All nature was filled with the 
beauty of God. He was like a great tree planted by 
the rivers of water that bringeth forth his fruit in his 
season. His leaf shall not wither. He is not dead. 
He lives. He speaks. He comforts. He blesses. He 
gives courage and hope to despairing ones. His 
memory is fragrant with the odors of heaven."^ 

Though few men ever suffered as he did, yet he had 
large recompense in the knowledge thaj; he had healed 
broken hearts and lifted troubled souls into the realms 
of peace. " If I should die to-morrow, you could not 
take it from me. I have lived, and what I have done 
will stand." " In Mr. Beecher's hands," it has been 
said, " the sermon never affrighted men, never froze 
men, never repelled men.'^^ 

People sometimes said that his sermons made them 
feel as if they had been fed, and warmed, and clothed. 
In both temporary and permanent effects, no ministry 
has ever been more conspicuous, wider, and, in 
some respects, more wholesome, than Henry Ward 
Beecher's. He had an enthusiasm, not for systems 



Letter, June 13, 1893. * " Parker's Eulogy." 
32 



498 HENRV WARD BEECHER. 

of truth, but for men. He looked on truth not as a 
sword to be polished, and kept free from heretica 
stain, so much as a weapon by which to smite sin, and 
a tool to be used in the upbuilding of manhood. He 
had a deeper insight into the human heart than into 
speculative theology. He set forth the truth of the 
Gospel, not so much by learning and logic, as by a 
life blazing with the spirit of religion, and a mind 
filled with the three reverences of which Goethe 
speaks: " For what is above us, for our equals, for 
what is beneath us." 

He Avas emphatically a fisher of men. Every lis- 
tener felt, " He means me." He cast his hook with 
great dexterity. His eagerness to catch men was as 
intense as that passion for fishing which led his 
father, when a boy, to sit by the branch throughout 
training day, and far into the night, reluctant to go 
until the bullheads stopped biting. To reach the 
heart, conscience, and life, Mr. Beecher was bold to 
use every means and faculty which God had given 
him — imagination, indignation, pathos, rebuke, good- 
natured humor, stinging wit, and a Niagara of thun- 
derous and passionate appeals. 

Few men were ever so open to divine influences. 
He had all the requisites of tlie great preacher, and 
all of them in superabundant force and fulness. He 
loved God and his fellow men. Love was the sover- 
eign element of his soul, ruling all his faculties and 
inspiring them. He had the prophet's powder and the 
prophet's susceptibility. What he saw and felt he 
could transform instantly into speech often more 
effective and telling than that elaborated by other 
men with painstaking care. 



HE PREACHED CHRIST. 499 

The great constituency of eager minds whom he 
reached in many lands was made possible by the 
newspaper and book publishers and by the skillful 
reports of his trusted stenographer, Mr. T. J. Ellin- 
wood. " On the borders of Puget Sound, in 1874, I 
met a former parishioner of his from Indianapolis. I 
said to him, * Well, what do you think of your old 
pastor now? ' He put his hand in his pocket, pulled 
out two or three copies of 'Plymouth Pulpit' and 
answered, * What does that look like ? ' Soon after 
this I met a man way up on the Snake River. His 
home was in Idaho. I asked him about his church 
privileges. * Oh,' said he, * we have no churches up 
there on the Palouse, but a few of us get together and 
read "Plymouth Pulpit " and we have pretty good 
preaching I tell you.' " ^ 

" While in Auckland, New Zealand, I had occasion 
to go into a book-store, and among the first things I 
saw upon the counter were the sermons of Plymouth 
Pulpit. . . . Near the Garden of Gethsemane, 
on the Mount of Olives, there is an old olive-tree; the 
guide or dragoman will tell you that it is known as 
* Beecher.' I know of scarcely a paper or book of 
note, throughout the nations of the world in which 
my wanderings have led me, of high repute, in which 
I have not seen his sayings quoted and his sermons 
reported. "^ " The greatest preacher on this planet," 
as Robert Collyer called him, ''reached through the 
press," as another has said, " members of a congrega- 
tion which St. Peter's could not have held had it been 
twenty times as large." 

1 Rev. A. H. Bradford, D.D., " Life," p. 354. 
'^ Philip Phillips, " Beecher Memorial," p. 92. 



500 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Even if he does not enter into an analysis of his pow- 
ers, the student should remember that Mr. Beecher mag- 
nified his office, that he cherished the highest estimate 
of the glory of preaching. Before the Board of Lon- 
don Congregational Ministers in 1886, he gave this 
testimony: " I suppose I have had as many oppor- 
tunities as any man here or any living man, for what 
are called honors and influence and wealth. The 
doors have been open, the golden doors, for years. I 
want to bear witness that the humblest labor which a 
minister of God can do for a soul, for Christ's sake, 
is grander and nobler than all learning, than all in- 
fluence and power, than all riches." ^ Or, as he said 
of the Christian ministry at the meeting of the Evan- 
gelical Alliance in 1873, i^ the Madison Square Pres- 
byterian Church, New York: "It is the sweetest in 
its substance, the most enduring in its choice, the 
most content in its poverty and limits, if your lot is 
cast in places of scarcity, more full of crowned hopes, 
more full of whispering messages from those gone 
before, nearer to the threshold, nearer to the throne, 
nearer to the brain, to the heart that was pierced, but 
that lives for ever and says, ' Because I live ye shall 
live also.' " 

It was Mr. Beecher's tremendous personal experi- 
ences that helped to give his preaching such a living 
and life-giving power. His words were vital with the 
life of God that throbbed through his great heart. 
He knew that, although more than most preachers he 
himself preached Christian ethics, the preacher's 
chief strength comes from God. " Abiding in the 



' " Life," pp. 615-616. 



HE PREACHED CHRIST. 50I 

Infinite and Eternal prepares one," he said, " to bring 
to the task of preaching something more than 
analytical power, than secular narrowness." 

It was not his sermons alone that touched with 
new life the multitudes that ever thronged to hear 
him. His prayers were a preparation for the preach- 
ing. " His sermons touched me like shocks from a 
spiritual battery, but his prayers were like the very 
breathing of the Spirit of God. ... I think few 
men have been able so to open the window of heaven 
and talk with God face to face. Few ministers have 
been able to make their congregations feel that the 
very heavens were raining mercy upon their bowed 
heads." ' 

Undoubtedly one of the chief elements of his power 
in the pulpit was his thorough acquaintance with 
men and his eminent ability to project himself into 
other people's lives, analyzing their motives and their 
troubles and showing himself the wise physician of 
the human soul. Mr. Halliday said: '' While scarcely 
any pastoral work is performed by him, yet his 
sermons manifest a most intimate knowledge of his 
people's spiritual condition." Though a man of 
strong emotions and gifted w4th large dramatic sense, 
he moved on men through the conscience before he 
appealed to emotion and sentiment. 

"His sermons," as Lyman Abbot has said, '^ are 
philosophical in their cast and make-up." This is 
certainly true of many of them, especially in the 
beginning, but, as his heart warms and his imagina- 
tion kindles, he becomes more practical, experimental, 



» Rev. Albert H. Heath, " Life" p. 356. 



502 HENRY WARD BF.ECHER. 

illustrative, and hortatory. He was a pioneer among 
preachers who have learned to bring truth down to 
date, and, instead of bombarding antiquity and 
preaching against sin in general or making it hot for 
the antediluvians, he shot forth his arrows in the day 
of battle against present foes. He gained a great 
advantage over most men in preaching, because he 
had a definite method of analysis. He divided 
character into elements. Whether the division was 
philosophical or not, it furnished him a vast homi- 
letic advantage. Instead of declaiming against a 
cloud-bank called sin, he drew a strong bow on cer- 
tain tigers, wolves, hyenas, and swine that are always 
prowling and growling within the human spirit. 

A number of students from Union Theological 
Seminary were present one evening in Plymouth 
Church, in April, 1875, and Mr. Beecher contrasted 
the theological examination which young ministers 
passed through, in which they told about what they 
had learned of Creation and Adam's Fall, and the 
Flood and Moses, with the questions he would put to 
them in order to make ministers fit for the time. " Do 
you know how I would proceed if I had the training 
and examining of these young men ? I would ask 
them what they knew of the daily papers. I would 
ask them what they think of the lizardly sneaks that 
make up the New York City Council." ^ 

All men know how marvelous was Mr. Beecher's 
power of illustration. Dr. E. P. Ingersoll, of Brook- 
lyn, said — '' His mind is analogical rather than logi- 
cal." His illustrations are taken from almost every 



^ Rev. Frank Russell, D.D., " Life," p. 372. 



HE PREACHED CHRIST. 503 

subject and object which his mind and eye ever 
beheld — from his father, mother, aunt, teachers, the 
farm, the orchard, the garden; from all the processes 
of nature and husbandry; from flowers, trees, summer, 
winter, autumn, spring, the barn, the barn-yard, the 
harvest-field, the horses, dogs, and swine; from the 
mountain streams, the clouds, the sky, the sun; from 
history, literature, theological writers, all the proc- 
esses of manufacturing, book-making, cloth-making, 
paper-making; from all the phenomena of light, the 
gray morning, the evening glories, the silent and 
shining stars. Illustrations that make the reader 
laugh abound. In this he followed the great preach- 
ers of the Middle Ages, and also the habit of Luther 
and some of the greater reform.ers. " Does vice, then," 
said Lessing, " deserve so much respect that a Chris- 
tian may not laugh at it ? " 

One characteristic of the Beecher sermon is its 
originality. He was a wise student of other men's 
opinions, but he revolved and recast all that entered 
his mind, and when it came out in words it had a 
stamp as clear-cut as Carlyle's or De Quincey's. He 
enjoyed being in the vanguard. The elation of the 
explorer was his. His daring genius may have led 
him into speculations that were mere guesses, but 
even his mistakes are instructive. If anybod)'- had 
put to himthe question that was put to Socrates, as 
reported by Plato in the " Gorgias," — '' Do you not 
think 3^ou are refuted when you say what no other 
man would say ? " — he might have answered that it 
was each man's privilege to see and say things as God 
gave him vision and understanding. 

Whatever may be thought of Mr. Beecher's later 



504 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

doctrinal views, it must be said that his theology was 
always a working theology, something which he could 
preach. Sharing so fully in the life of his time, put- 
ting himself into the intellectual position of those 
without the Church, he was able, with singular skill, 
to meet their difficulties. Hon. Andrew D. White 
has said: "Some of his theological statements seemed 
to me really inspired. He seemed to have a deep 
insight into the great truths of religion and to be able 
to present them to others, opening up at times great 
new vistas of truth by a single flash." 

He believed that Christianity is represented by the 
sum of all the sects, not by any one of them. Hence 
those who value most in a sermon conformity to their 
own theological and ecclesiastical views, will not 
always be pleased with the sermons of Henry Ward 
Beecher. He looked upon the Church and its organi- 
zation and ordinances, and upon truth itself, as means 
to the great end of building up Christian manhood. 
He said: "I immerse, I sprinkle, and I have in some 
instances poured, and I never saw that there was any 
difference in the Christianity that was made." He 
believed that God had given him a great work to do, 
especially in his last years, in bringing the Church 
into harmony with the conclusions of modern inves- 
tigation. He declared himself in 1885 to be in the 
fullest sympathy with revivals and revival work. It 
is important that this should be remembered by those 
who were troubled by some of his utterances and 
feared that in his devotion to evolution he had left 
the old evangelic foundations. 

Of no man since Paul can it be said more truly 
than of Mr. Beecher, that with his whole heart he 



HE PREACHED CHRIST. 505 

preached Christ. Not one of the kings of the pulpit 
has been a more rapturous devotee of Christ. Christ 
was his God, his Redeemer, his Friend. So absolute 
was his worship of Christ and devotion to Him that 
he never for an instant cherished the thought of 
ranking Him with the greatest of the sons of men. 
The heart of Christ was the Divine heart on which 
he leaned. The sayings of Christ were the germs of 
all heavenly wisdom, and he would no more have 
thought of comparing the greatest sermons of Jeremy 
Taylor and Chalmers, or the greatest speeches of 
Demosthenes and Burke, with Christ's Sermon on 
the Mount, than we would have compared the fine 
jewelry of a king's diadem with the unwasting stellar 
fires of the Milky Way. 

He realized that whatever excellence he attained in 
preaching was only fragmentary. He knew that in 
order to preach, a man must have native gifts and 
aptitudes — physical, intellectual, and spiritual ; he 
must not be lacking either in enthusiasm or in judg- 
ment, in discipline or in feeling, in training or in 
spontaneousness ; he must have communion with 
God and community of spirit with men; and he 
realized that, however greatly he had been gifted 
and blessed, his utterances were vastly imperfect. 
He had a glimpse of the glory and possibility of 
preaching which he, himself, never reached. ** There 
have often been times when I would have given all 
the world if I could have gone into the pulpit and 
told what I felt and not simply what I thought. T 
have had moods when writing as well as when read- 
ing that I could not describe. I have had states in 
care and trouble when I was lifted above troubles and 



5o6 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

cares, and when I saw things so serenely beautiful, 
that nothing would have been too much to give if I 
could make other people see them so; but I could 
not. I think I know what Paul meant when he said 
he went into the seventh heaven, and saw things that 
were not lawful — in other words, that it was not 
possible to utter." ^ 

No one knows Henry Ward Beecher who has not 
felt how completely loyal he was to Jesus Christ. 
" No man," said Dr. AUon, " has more fully or fer- 
vently preached Christ as the Divine Son of God." 
His theological vagaries, the bold flights of his imag- 
ination and speculation, never carried him away from 
Christ. He said that the hymn which he wished to 
have sung at the last service over his body was: 

" When I survey the wondrous Cross 
On which the Prince of Glory died, 
My richest gain 1 count but loss, 
And pour contempt on all my pride." 

Mrs. Stowe said of him: "He has been a student 
of Huxley, Spencer, and Darwin, enough to alarm 
the old school, and yet remained so ardent a super- 
naturalist as equally to repel the radicals and de- 
structionists in religion. He and I are Christ-wor- 
shipers, adoring Him as the image of the invisible 
God."^ He once said: "There is no flower in all the 
field that owes so much to the sun as I do to the 
Lord Jesus Christ." 

Undoubtedly much of the popular interest excited 



' From Mr. T. J. Ellinwood's "Reminiscences." 
2 " Life of Mrs. Stowe," p. 477. 



HE PREACHED CHRIST. 507 

by his preaching in later years, came from his vigor- 
ous onslaughts upon offending dogmas. Others have 
noted the fact that he often set up men of straw, but 
he attacked them as if they were steel-clad knights. 
His soul was so full of faith in the living Christ that 
he had no sympathy with the fears of men who im- 
agine that, when their theories of the Bible are 
shaken, the Kingdom of God is in peril. He said of 
the Bible: "It is the most betrashed book in the 
world. Coming to it through commentaries, is much 
like looking at a landscape through garret windows 
o'er which generations of unmolested spiders have 
spun their webs." " You may sink the Bible to the 
bottom of the ocean, and man's obligations to God 
will be unchanged." This is undoubtedly true, and 
j'^et was not this truth in peril of reaching some 
minds in such a way that they suspected Mr. 
Beecher's willingness to sink the Bible into the sea? 
Most men know that it was Mr. Beecher's custom 
usually to preach, not from a written manuscript, but 
from a more or less full outline, from which, however, 
he frequently departed. The following is a copy of 
an outline from which he preached Sunday evening, 
December 7, 1875: 

I. Repentance, is such a sense of evil as inspires one to turn 
from it. In single particulars. 

1. It happens in wordly things every day. 

2. It is common to social life. 

II. It may include a whole line oi conduct, rather than a 
single action. 

III. It may have respect to one's whole career and charac- 
ter. 

IV. In all cases — two elements. 



5o8 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

1. Avtdsiofi from sin or evil. 

2. Turning to good. 

This last of supreme practical importance. 

The shadow of grain destroys most of weeds — 

Right action the method of correcting bad — 

There must be an outlet to mental forces. If stopped in 

one direction, should open in another. 
Dan. 4: 2y. Break off thy sins by righteousness. 
V. Men need help, 

1. From fellow men, 

2. From surrounding circumstances, 

3. Especially from Spirit of God. 

I. Men may make repentance of minor sins, a shield for 
greater. Right so far, but wrong in whole. 

II. Men hide from selves the extent of sin, the need of re- 
pentance, the evil and danger of course, self-flattery. 

III. Superficial repentance. 

IV. Repentance not followed tip and confirmed, emotion not 
action. 

V. Solemn appeal to all whether in conduct, habits, char- 
acter. Ought not to go higher? 

VI. K of H [Kingdom of Heaven] is near to many of you! * 

" In his sermons," says a writer in The Nation^ 
*' there is no evidence of carelessness; there is in each 
a complete plan steadfastly held to from beginning 
to end," He was all the while preparing his sermons, 
reading whenever he had a spare moment, visiting 
workshops, observing men, but rarely deciding what 
sermon he would preach until Sunday morning. One 
preparation for Sunday was doing nothing on Satur- 
day that required exhausting thought. He was found 
resting at Peekskill, gazing in the shop windows, 
diverting his mind by looking at the gems at Tiffany's, 



^ Kindly given by Rev. S. B. Halliday. 



HE PREACHED CHRIST. 509 

taking good sleep, spending the evening with his 
family or friends. 

Sunday morning he was happy, cheerful, abstemi- 
ous, somewhat absorbed. He was soon locked in his 
room, not to be disturbed, and there he sketched in 
large outline his sermon. " As the bell rang for the 
last time, about fifteen minutes before the opening of 
the service, he would come out, his papers thrown 
hastily together, held in his hand or thrust in his 
coat-pocket, and with scarcely a word to any one, put 
on his hat, take Mrs. Beecher on his arm, and start for 
church." ' 

He sometimes changed his topic after entering the 
pulpit. The music, the Scriptural reading, the prayer, 
usually fed his own soul and prepared him for that 
hour in which he enchained the attention of men with 
the truth of God. 

He was a constant student in his own way, and be- 
lieved with Chrysostom, that study is even more 
indispensable for the eloquent than for the ordinary 
preacher. " Variety, vivacity, and velocity of appeal" 
are mentioned by Dr. Storrs as essentials to the great 
modern sermon, and there was no lack of these qual- 
ities in the preaching of Henry Ward Beecher. 

Much as he made fun of theologians and commen- 
taries, he studied both and valued both. His son-in- 
law, Rev. Samuel Scoville, was astonished at " the 
evidences found in note-books and books of analysis 
of his broad and painstaking study of the Gospels." 
He carried Stanley's Commentary on the Epistles to 
the Corinthians for weeks in his carpet-bag, and 



» •• Biography," p. 599. 



5IO HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Studied and nctated it from beginning to end. Scores 
of little note-books were filled with his thoughts, 
points for sermons, etc. " A singular feature of his 
productive power," writes Mr. R. W. Raymond, "was 
that it seldom lasted more than a couple of hours." 
He seemed to be under the control of his genius. His 
mind worked under certain laws which he well learned. 
" I am brooding my Thanksgiving sermon," he wrote 
in 1852, " but the chickens will not yet run out from 
under the wing." " He had three distinct mental 
states, the passive or resting, the receptive and in- 
quiring or filling up, and the spontaneously active or 
giving-forth state." ^ 

The tide of life was strong in him, but it was not 
always at the full. As with some of the great poets, 
there was a marked periodicity in his mental pro- 
ductiveness. He seemed to know when he must rest. 
He recognized the value of sleep. The flowers of his 
imagination and reason would often come to miracu- 
lous brilliancy by a sudden burst of creative force and 
then the orchard of his mind would refuse for a while 
to put forth any further blossoms. In creative work 
he was a man of moods. He often said: " I cannot 
work unless the sap flows." But he was always indus- 
triously filling in or getting his accumulations into 
shape, vitalizing them with conscious and unconscious 
thought. 

He was not one of the artistic preachers " who w^ork 
literary miracles on paper." Preaching with him was 
too earnest and practical a business for him to attempt 
such wonders. His miracles are numerous enough, 

1 " Life," p. 657. 



HE PREACHED CHRIST. 51I 

but they are like those of the May sunshine, startling 
the earth with violets. However lofty his idealism 
and eagle-winged his flights of imagination, there is 
always a healthy and strong foundation of sturdy 
common sense which may be truly called a general 
characteristic of his preaching. 

It must not be forgotten that his Church helped to 
make him eloquent and powerful. With that great 
and generous congregation back of him, he had the 
means of crystallizing his generous ideas into gener- 
ous deeds. He could not only point out the lessons of 
the Chicago Fire, but he could secure on one Sunday 
morning from his people a gift of five thousand dol- 
lars for the Chicago sufferers. The wholesomeness 
of Mr. Beecher's preaching is its close practical con- 
nection with all human life. He was always a 
preacher. Whether writing editorials, or speaking 
against slavery, or lecturing on the burdens of society; 
whether we find him in the White Mountains, where 
for years he sought rest from hay fever, or journey- 
ing with the Brooklyn Thirteenth Regiment, whose 
chaplain he became in 1878, it is the great-hearted 
preacher who comes before us and speaks to us with 
powers so wonderful that " it is scarcely more neces- 
sary to certify to them," as Senator Conkling once 
said, "than to certify to the light of the sun." 

And, then, Mr. Beecher spake in words which went 
to the universal heart. The people heard him gladly 
and read him gratefully, and will read him for many 
years to come. What he, himself, thought of literary 
style and practiced as well, is suggested by a remark 
in one of his Yale Lectures, where he contrasts John 
Bunyan and Dr. Johnson. It indicates his preference 



512 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

for Saxon words and homely idioms. " Bunyan is 
to-day like a tree planted by the rivers of water that 
bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also 
shall not wither. Johnson, with all his glory, lies 
like an Egyptian king, buried and forgotten in the 
pyramid of his fame." 

He thought " great sermons ** a temptation of the 
devil. He had no great sermons reserved for special 
occasions, and yet in the course of his ministry there 
came times when even those who heard him con- 
stantly were overwhelmed with astonishment by the 
grandeur and power of his utterance. 

Mr. Beecher needs to be read largely in order to 
be understood adequately, and yet the following ser- 
mons may be named as giving an idea of the variety, 
force, adaptation, and occasional sublimity of his 
pulpit speech: The Sepulchre in the Garden, The 
Communion of Saints, The Courtesy of Conscience, 
What is Christ to Me ? The Primacy of Love, The 
Christian Life a Struggle. 

Dr. Bushnell affected many thoughtful minds more 
powerfully than Beecher, but looking at the full 
breadth of his influence, especially over the younger 
ministry, noting how widely his themes and lines of 
thought are reproduced in the general preaching of 
the day, we see that to Mr. Beecher, rather than to 
Dr. Bushnell, belongs Professor Hoppin's designation 
of " Epoch-making." He has been likened, by the 
Rev. Dr. Hillis, to a man, who, crossing a continent, 
scattered his thoughts, like handfuls of seeds, every- 
where. The harvests are now appearing. 



CHAPTER XLVIII. 

"SECURUS JUDICAT ORBIS TERRARUM." 

Henry Ward Beecher's death was mourned, not 
only wherever the English language is spoken, but 
by the great men of France and throughout Germany, 
where, as Baron Tauchnitz wrote, " His memory will 
endure among the great and good of all lands." 

On the 24th of June, 1891, his statue, by John Quincy 
Adams Ward, was unveiled in front of the Brooklyn 
City Hall. Thirty-five thousand dollars had been 
contributed by the friends of the great man — men, 
women, and children of all creeds and nationalities. 
It was unveiled by his granddaughter, Gertrude 
Roxana Beecher. Prayer was offered by the Rev. S. 
B. Halliday. Rev. Charles H. Hall, D.D., of Trinity 
Episcopal Church, introduced Mayor Chapin, who 
presided on the occasion. Three hundred children, 
from the Sunday-schools of Plymouth Church and of 
the Bethel and Mayflower Missions, sang Mr. 
Beecher's favorite hymn, 

" Love divine, all love excelling," 

accompanied by the band of the Thirteenth Regi- 
ment. After a portion of Beethoven's Fifth Sym- 

33 



514 HENRy WARD BEECHER. 

phony, so beloved by Mr. Beecher, had been played, 
President Seth Low, of Columbia College, made an 
address, and after the singing of "America," Rabbi 
Gottheil, of New York, pronounced the closing 
benediction. 

On a pedestal of dark Quincy granite, designed by 
the great architect, Richard M. Hunt, rises the statue 
of Mr. Beecher, of heroic size, and representing him 
as a man of great courage and sympathy. Mr. 
Beecher stands with overcoat on, and his soft felt hat 
in hand, as if he had stopped for a moment in a 
walk, or was about to address an out-door assemblage. 
On the pedestal is the figure of a negro girl raising a 
branch of palm to show^ the gratitude of her people. 
There are also two other graceful figures represent- 
ing two white children, a boy seated and endeavoring 
to support the figure of a girl, who is trying to push 
a garland up to the plinth. 

What will live of Henry Ward Beecher ? Most of 
all, his life and work. He was a man of action. 
What he did, backed by what he was, makes him one 
of the heroes of history. Most men know little of 
Luther's writings, but Luther confronting the Diet 
of Worms is the most splendid figure of the sixteenth 
century. Henry Ward Beecher, fifty years hence, 
will be a name to conjure by, like Luther and AVesley, 
Hampden and Chatham. Peter McCleod, of Glasgow, 
said: "Had Mr. Beecher only come to England two 
years sooner, there w^ould have been little sympathy 
in Britain for the slave-holding South." Joseph 
Cook said, "I suppose he drove Louis Napoleon out 
of Mexico by that series of lectures. It is certain 
that he did as much as any other one American to 



"SECURUS JUDICAT ORBIS TERRARUM. 515 

prevent a recognition of the Southern Confederacy 
by the British Government." ^ 

" Could his compatriots know what Mr. Beecher 
did for America in that unparalleled campaign, no 
marble in Carrara would be too fine for them to buy 
and carve, that his bust, classical in an artistic eye, 
might fill the proudest niche in the proudest temple 
of his country." * 

" It was a fitting recognition of his services in Eng- 
land," as President Hayes has said, " that Henry Ward 
Beecher should replace upon Fort Sumter the flag 
wliich disunion and slavery had pulled down." ^ Mr. 
Beecher was the greatest spokesman in our generation 
for the spirit of humanity. Great varieties of char- 
acter and genius were wrapped up in this one soul. 
Rev. H. R. Haweis wrote in The Contemporary Review^ 
in 1872: "It would be no compliment to call Henry 
Ward Beecher the American Spurgeon. He may be 
that, but he is more. If we can imagine Mr. Spur- 
geon and Mr. John Bright, with a cautious touch of 
Mr. Maurice and a strong tincture of the late F. W. 
Robertson, — if, I say, — it is possible to imagine such 
a compound being, brought up in New England and 
at last securely fixed in a New York pulpit, we shall 
get a product not unlike Henry Ward Beecher." And 
yet it would not be Henry Ward Beecher. 

There was that in him as divinely original as any- 
thing in Shakespeare. There is a peculiar quality in 
his thought, and there was a peculiar power in his 



*" Boston Monday Lectures, 1888," p. 145. 
^ " Parker's Eulogy," p. 23. 
^ Beecher " Memorial," p. 19. 



5l6 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

presence and words tliat belonged to him alone. His 
magnetic, flaming, positive nature affected men in 
such diverse ways, striking them at such different 
angles, that they became usually his warm friends or 
his bitter enemies. ProjDably he shared more largely 
than any other the honor, which came to his Master, 
of being the best abused man of his time. In Liver- 
pool he was stigmatized as " The Clown Preacher," 
"The Arch-Insurrectionist," "The Nigger Worshiper," 
"The Free-Love Monster"; by his people he was 
adored almost as a demigod, certainly as an inspired 
prophet. So far as character is concerned, men should 
be in a measure judged by the impression which their 
personality makes on prejudiced but frank and honest 
minds. Many ministers went to the Brooklyn Coun- 
cil in 1876, unsettled in their opinions and troubled 
at heart. " But I left the Council," wrote Rev. Fran- 
cis N. Zabriskie, D.D., " firmly persuaded (as were all 
who attended) that Henry Ward Beecherwas not only 
unjustly accused, but that he was one of the noblest 
and, in this matter, one of the saintliest souls which 
the grace of Christ had moved and moulded." ^ 

An admirer of Mr. Beecher's, a leading business 
man of Chicago. Mr. A. C. Bartlett, relates that, con- 
versing one Sunday morning with a lady who believed 
all sorts of crimes had been committed by the pastor 
of Plymouth Church, he requested her to go to Cen- 
tral Music Hall, where he thought Mr. Beecher, who 
was in town, would attend the preaching services of 
Prof. David Swing, and where, it seemed to him very 
likely Mr. Beecher would be called upon to offer 

1 "Life," p. 364. 



"SECURUS JUDICAT ORBIS TERRARUM. 517 

prayer. His expectations were fulfilled in every par- 
ticular. Her prejudiced ladyship was there, and came 
under the influence of that great personality who 
seemed to have a firmer hold on the tenderness of 
God than any other follower of Christ since the death 
of the Beloved Disciple. From that time on, to at 
least one of his enemies, Mr. Beecher was a good man. 

As to the fertility of Mr, Beecher's mind, there is 
but one opinion. " For full fifty years," says Edward 
Pierrepont, '^ he talked to the public, and no man said 
so much, and repeated himself so little." Dr. Mark 
Hopkins, who was a wise judge of greatness, has 
written: "No such instance of prolonged steady 
power at one point, in connection with other labors 
so extended and diversified, and magnificent in re- 
sults, has ever been known." ^ 

Of Mr. Beecher's oratorical genius there is, and 
will be, no divided opinion. Without the high breed- 
ing of Phillips in oratory, and of Lowell and Hig- 
ginson in literature, he surpasses them in warmth and 
breadth. No other man of his time had quite the 
range of Mr. Beecher's vocal powers at tlieir best. He 
who could thunder could whisper. Schiller said: 
" Divide up the thunder into separate notes, and it 
becomes a lullaby for children, but pour it forth in 
one continuous peal, and its royal sound will shake 
the heavens." Mr. Beecher could divide the thunder 
at any instant, and change its trumpet peals into lul- 
labies. Tears and laughter, pathos and humor, were 
close together, and often intermingled in his preach- 
ing, as in the grave-digger scene from "Hamlet." 



^''' Beecher Metnorial," p. 58. 



5l8 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Speaking of Mr. Beecber's advocacy of the Union 
cause in England, Dr. Mark Hopkins said: " Probably 
the world has seen no grander instance of the ascen- 
dency of eloquence and of the personal power of a 
single man, and he a foreigner, in the face of preju- 
diced and excited mobs." ^ 

The National mind, at its greatest epoch, found its 
fullest, most powerful, and perfect expression in the 
words of Lincoln, Emerson, Lowell, Whittier, Phil- 
lips, Beecher, and Mrs. Stowe. " He was essentially 
a National man, grasping all the thoughts and feel- 
ings of a Continent." ^ 

Prof. Roswell D. Hitchcock, who frequently occu- 
pied Mr. Beecher's pulpit, and who said: "If the real 
tone and temper of a minister may be inferred from 
the tone and temper of his people, I have abundant 
reason to think well of the Plymouth preacher and 
pastor," has recorded his admiration of Mr. Beecher's 
sturdy patriotism. " Of the old Puritan stock, he 
was an American through and through, and out and 
out. He had no European affectations — French, An- 
glican, German or any other. He recognized in our 
National history a new democratic evangel. In his 
opinion, not Plymouth Rock only, but Liberty itself 
was struck by the shots that were fired on Sumter. 
Outside of the Army, outside of the Government, no 
Northern man did more than he for the Northern 
cause." ^ 

But, though thoroughly American, and perhaps for 
that very reason, Mr. Beecher has been cordially 



1 " Beecher Memorial," p. 58. 

2 General Shennan, "Beecher Memorial," p. 4. 
' " Beecher Memorial," p. 73. 



**SECURUS JUDICAT ORBIS TERRARUM. 519 

adopted in Great Britain. Newman Hall has called 
him " a link of brotherhood between the two coun- 
tries "; and though he was compelled to speak some 
strong words in condemnation of the English ruling 
classes, he was always more than half in love with the 
mother land. On his last visit to England he said 
of her: " Through light and dark, through good and 
through evil, she has proved herself to be the right 
hand of the Almighty God for light, for liberty, and 
for victory." v 

Many men, naturally disposed to think highly of 
Mr. Beecher's genius, have been strongly repelled by 
what they deem his theological eccentricities. The 
perusal of this volume it is hoped will show some of 
these that Henry Ward Beecher was thoroughly 
sound at heart. "Whatever the eccentricities of his 
career and of his mind, the centrifugal force," as Dr. 
Leonard Bacon has said, '^ was checked, and the star 
held in its orbit by the attraction of the Sun of 
Righteousness." ' 

Before his doctrinal errancies are too severely con- 
demned they should be accurately estimated. He 
was a preacher of the fundamental truths of Christi- 
anity, and a vigorous antagonist of many views which 
did not seem to him true and certainly are not the 
common property and inheritance of the catholic 
Church. His preaching of retribution may not have 
been adequate, but it was effective of its kind. When 
retribution is preached with great definiteness as to 
place and time and mode, it is in peril of becoming 
incredible, 

» •• Life." p. 361. 



520 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

Mr. Beecher must be judged by his temperament, 
his philosophy, and by his main purpose, which was 
to build up Christian manhood. He believed in 
everything that would help to make the whole life 
religious and holy. " I do not believe a child brought 
up under my ministry in this Church will ever see 
flowers till he dies, without having some thought of 
religion, of the sanctuary." ' 

In 1878 and 1879 ^^ gave a series of Sunday-evening 
talks about the early books of the Old Testament, 
lectures designed to free the interpretation of the 
Word of God from superstition and to bring the 
Bible back into the atmosphere in which it was born. 
He believed that the more intelligent the knowledge 
of the Scriptures, the sweeter they will be to the 
soul. Doubtless he would have been saved from 
many over-statements if he had not been gifted with 
such marvelous spontaneity of utterance, and had 
been compelled to write laboriously his matured 
thought. He had almost a fatal facility for preach- 
ing. 

The story of his life must give to many hearts a 
new sense of the delightsomeness and glory of a life 
dedicated to the highest things. Full of abounding 
labors for others, above most men he knew what it 
was to find in toil the highest liberty, the greatest 
cheer, the most abounding fruitfulness and remunera- 
tion. He once said: " That is not work alone that 
brings sweat to the brow. Work may be light, 
unburdensome, as full of song as the merry brook 
that turns the miller's wheel; but no wheel is ever 



^Ladies' Home Journal, April, 1893. 



" SECURUS JUDICAT ORBIS TERRARUM. 52I 

turned without the rush and weight of the stream 
upon it." 

He felt with Emerson that it is the duty of the 
preacher to bring cheering and invigorating messages 
to his fellow men. '' One of the most important fruits 
of his ministry," as Chancellor Sims, of the Syracuse 
University, has said, "is the influence of his preaching 
upon other ministers; to them all over the world he 
has been an inspiration and an interpreter of spiritual 
truth." 

He was one of tlie many streams of influence that 
helped to wash away the roughness of the old New 
England orthodoxy. Unitarianism, which carried 
truth in the bosom of its errors, was a movement 
which, though lacking important elements, greatly 
modified the creeds and preaching of the Evangelical 
pulpit. It aided in restoring the balance to Christian 
truth which leaned too decidedly to high Calvinism 
with its undue depression of man, its intellectual 
dogmatism, and its hiding of the Fatherhood of God. 

Another stream of modifying influence came from 
Methodism. New England was cold intellectualism; 
Methodism was fervent heart-power. New England 
emphasized the convictions ; Methodism, the emo- 
tions. The revival movements which 'Wesley and 
Whitfield led reached the Atlantic seaboard of Amer- 
ica and kindled new fires in later years, when Nettle- 
ton, Lyman Beecher, and Finney, imbued with the 
zeal of missionaries and apostles, awoke slumbering 
Congregationalism and Presbyterianism, and gave to 
preaching fresh fervor and greater directness. For 
some time John Calvin has been sitting at the feet of 
John Wesley. 



522 HENRY WARD BEFXHER. 

Furthermore, the Providence of God, in the events 
and changes of National life in America, has modified 
to some extent the methods and agencies of Chris- 
tian teaching. The preacher no longer occupies the 
same relative position in the social organization. 
Lyman Beecher, in 1812, was a member of the Stand- 
ing Ecclesiastical Order of Connecticut, an estab- 
lished Church — Congregational not Episcopalian. 
The downfall of that order, which he resisted, but 
afterwards declared to be the best thing that ever 
happened to the Church, led the way to the readjust- 
ment of the preacher's place in society. Henry Ward 
Beecher was simply a citizen of Brooklyn whom two 
thousand and more independent persons voluntarily 
supported, and who by his genius enlarged his con- 
gregation to the bounds of the English-speaking 
world. Still further, the Church in our time has 
been providentially called to face the great evils of 
social and political life. Lyman Beecher himself was 
a fearful inr.ovator when, in his famous sermons on 
intemperance, he rebuked the drinking customs of the 
clergy and the people, and encouraged Christian men 
to labor for a thorough and grander reformation. 
His son encountered greater opposition and accom- 
plished greater results by his magnificent and long- 
continued arraignment of the monster crime of 
slavery. 

Again, in God's Providence, New England has been 
taken up by the Divine hand and spread over the 
Continent. The little democratic villages of Massa- 
chusetts where the population was homogeneous and 
the mini ter was a State officer, have been greatly 
modified. The railroads have been mighty reformers. 



"SECURUS JUDICAT ORBIS TERRARUM. 523 

New peoples have come to old neighborhoods. In- 
stead of a uniform kindred population, the modern 
preacher deals with heterogeneous elements. Con- 
trast the thousands who listened to Henry Ward 
Beecher, persons gathered from many nations, living 
in a great city, breathing an atmosphere quick with 
excitement, with ideas gathered from ten thou- 
sand sources, students in the great university of 
modern life, contrast them with a congregation 
assembled two hundred years ago in a Salem meeting- 
house, living by themselves, fighting Indians, discus- 
sing speculative theology, divided by social distinc- 
tions, as Gentleman and Good-man, called together 
by a horn-blower to whom each family paid a pound 
of pork, joining in psalms that were as melodious as 
an ancient hand-organ, and listening for two hours to 
a solemn divine in a Geneva cloak with black gloves 
** opened at the thumb and finger for the handling of 
the manuscript." Such a contrast will show, both 
how different must be the styles of preaching, and 
how the preacher himself is affected by the times in 
which he dwells. 

Mr. Beecher was a representative as well as the 
leader of his age. He who, as David Dudley Field 
has said, spoke from more pulpits and platforms than 
any other man of his time, was the child as well as 
the maker of the epoch in which he lived. 

Henry Ward Beecher will be longest remembered 
in connection with the Christian pulpit from the fact 
that, more than any other preacher who has ever 
lived, he made men feel the love of God. He had an 
abiding and all-pervading faith in the Lord Jesus 
Christ as God in the flesh, expressing to man the very 



524 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

nature of God. He believed that such a Gospel as 
Christ taught would always bring cheer and hope to 
sinful men. He was careful not to slam the door in 
the face of any needy son of God. Among all the 
preachers of the world he was the hope-giver. He 
never left his hearers in the condition in which 
Parson Simpson's sermon left Mrs. Stowe's Sam 
Lawson, who reported it as follows: " Our state by 
nature is just like this, we was clar down in a well 
fifty feet deep, the sides all round nothin' but glare 
ice, but we're under immediate obligations to get out 
'cause we was free, voluntary agents. But nobody 
ever has got out or would, unless the Lord reached 
down and took 'em, but whether He would or not 
nobody could tell. It was all sovereignty. There is 
not one in ten thousand that would be saved. I felt 
kind of empty, as a body may say. Lord a' massy, 
said I to myself, if that is so, they are any of them 
welcome to my chance." 

Dr. Armitage, of New York, clearly perceived that 
all of the greatness and goodness of Mr. Beecher, to 
whom he gave the first place among the preachers of 
his time, would be finally discovered after he was 
dead. He was one of those men " who connect the 
past with the future and make of themselves bridges 
for the passage of multitudes." ^ 

He was not the founder of a sect. He probably had 
some sympathy with Lessing who said : "I hate from 
the bottom of my heart those who wish to found 
sects; it is not error of itself that makes the misfortune 
of men, but sectarian error, or even sectarian truth, were 



*Egglesion, " Beecher Memorial," p. 64. 



"SECURUS JUDICAT ORBIS TERRARUM." 525 

it possible for the truth to form a sect ! " Probably he 
was the greatest apostle of that coming Christian 
unity, which, without obliterating natural differences, 
shall yet usher in the Kingdom of True Brotherhood. 
He realized and taught, as few men in our times have 
taught, that in Jesus Christ this unity is found. "As 
I grow older, I come to feel as though the future 
results of my work will be out of all proportion to 
anything we see now. It is the expectation of the 
unknown results of the future that comforts me here. 
It is very easy for me to say this, because I have sight 
as well as faith." ^ 

Mr. Beecher, who was introduced to a Chicago 
audience by his brother William as " the greatest 
heretic of the age," will probably not be deemed so 
heretical by the next generation. " One New Year's 
Day," writes Mr. W. E. Davenport, of Brooklyn, "not 
earlier than 1884, I stopped at his house and found 
him conversing with callers. One of his acquaint- 
ances, noticing a finely executed bust of Lyman 
Beecher looked at it for a moment and then, turning 
to Mr. Beecher said, interrogatively: 'That is a like- 
ness of your father ? ' ' Yes,' replied Mr. Beecher, and 
then meditatively, *and it has often been a source of 
satisfaction to me to know that he was once up for 
trial on the charge of heresy. It has seemed to me 
that, in being thought somewhat unorthodox myself, 
I have simply been keeping in line with his spirit and 
the temper he would approve. Now, this Lyman 
Beecher is looked back to as a very model and pattern 
of orthodoxy, and his writings are appealed to as of 



'Mr. T. J. Ellinwood's " Reminiscences." 



526 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

the safest and most conservative character; but there 
have been great changes since his day, and there are 
bound to be more, so tliat it would not be so much 
of a surprise if some future heresy-hunter, in times 
when theological thought has undergone further 
developments, should look back upon me as one of 
the main standbys of the old school, and quote pass- 
ages out of my sermons in support of his ortho- 
doxy, and say ' (Here Mr. Beecher raised his voice 
and assumed quite a ministerial air): 'Hear what 
that illustrious Henry Ward Beecher, that celebrated 
authority of Congregationalism, says, and so make my 
words a barrier to all broader teaching,' All this, 
of course, Mr. Beecher said with a good-natured 
twinkle of the eyes that showed how fully he appre- 
ciated the absurdity of it under present circumstances 
and regarded so sad a misapprehension of him as a 
remote possibility." 

When those who knew Mr, Beecher well get 
together and speak of him, they are often reminded 
of this or that scene in which he stands before them 
in some characteristic attitude, " I remember him," 
says one, " as he spoke a comforting word in his lec- 
ture-room talk, and seemed to know the deepest needs 
of my life." Another remembers him as he appeared 
surrounded by a group of ministers, eager to catch 
something from his lips that should reveal the sources 
of his power, and recalls how he said: ''When I am 
talking with other folks, I often feel that I am 
nobody, but when I stand in my pulpit I sometimes 
teel omnipotent," 

Another says: " I remember him as he stood before 
the Council of 1876, and described his experience 



"SECURUS JUDICAT ORBIS TERRARUM. ' 527 

when fully grasping the horror of the conspiracy 
which threatened to destroy him, and he exclaimed in a 
voice which made every one shudder, * I was like a 
man who, awakening at midnight, found himself in a 
menagerie of serpents.'" 

Another (Rev. James L. Hill, D. D., of Medford, 
Mass.) says: *' I remember him as he stood in Pilgrim 
Hall in Boston shortly after his great trial. A large 
company of ministers, some of whom had been hos- 
tile, were gathered there, and the old man, the white 
locks making a halo of splendor around his head, 
prayed in that voice of melting pathos, and the tears 
came rolling down his checks as he brought the 
hearts of his friends and foes close to the heart of his 
merciful and adorable Saviour." 

How much of Mr. Beecher's literary work will sur- 
vive ? A great deal of it has that peculiar quality, 
imagination, which Lowell calls ''the great anti- 
septic." He is one of the most quotable of men, as 
quotable as Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Bacon, or 
Emerson. Five or six volumes from his sermons, 
speeches, and essays, would contain too much wit 
and wisdom for posterity to willingly let die. He 
had Franklin's and Lincoln's homely way of say- 
ing things, and much of Thomas a Kempis's spirit- 
uality and power of bringing consolation to bruised 
hearts. Poet, moralist, humorist, and master of 
pithy proverbs, why should not Mr. Beecher be 
among the immortals in literature? A hundred 
years hence, when the Republic has become " the 
most powerful and prosperous community ever 
devised or developed by man," and the historian 
reviews the critical years of the nineteenth cen- 



528 HENRY WARD BEECIiER. 

tury, in which Mr, Beecher had so conspicuous a 
part, he will then be a larger and loftier figure than 
now. 

There is no life of this century that is better worth 
studying than Henry Ward Beecher's. When men 
are a little further removed from it, they will know 
its greatness better. The coming generations will 
read his story, and find it the story of the epoch in 
which he lived. They will say: Here is the man who 
touched the life of his time at every point. He was 
a man of original power and of prophetic insight. He 
was a man most of whose nature was bathed in 
wholesome sunshine, and he taught that gloom and 
sickliness are not synonymous with piety, and do not 
contribute to the noblest Christian manhood. He 
raised great multitudes of men to higher conceptions 
of true living. He broke the shackles of the pulpit, 
and was a pioneer in that new Christianity which 
covers the whole domain of life. Liberty fired his 
soul, and he spoke with the tongue of Patrick Henry 
and Samuel Adams. The Gospel entered into his 
very being, and he preached Christ with Paul's fer- 
vor, and with the affectionateness of the beloved Dis- 
ciple. He found humanity manacled by traditional- 
ism, and he helped to deliver it into a wider free- 
dom. To the sensitive heart of a woman, he added a 
lion-like courage, and a Miltonic loftiness of spirit. 
He bore no malice toward men, and endured con- 
tumely as a good Soldier of the Cross. To the more 
than royal imagination of Jeremy Taylor, he added 
a zeal as warm as Whitfield's. In him the wit of 
Sidney Smith was combined with the common sense 
of John Bunyan. In the annals of oratory his place 



*'SECURUS JUDICAT ORBIS TERRARUM." 529 

is near that of Demosthenes. Among reformers he 
need fear no comparison with Wendell Phillips, John 
Bright, Mazzini, or Charles Sumner. In moral ge- 
nius for statesmanship he was the brother of Abraham 
Lincoln, and, in the annals of the pulpit, he can only 
be mentioned with the greatest names — Chrysostom, 
Bernard, Luther, Wesley, Chalmers, Spurgeon. He 
was a noble builder in the Republic of God, the great 
Church of the Future. 

Toiling with prodigious industry' on earth, Mr. 
Beecher's heart was for long years in Heaven. There 
came to him visions brighter than those that cheered 
Christian and Hopeful from the Delectable Mount- 
ains. He went down into the deep river, trusting in 
the sure promises of God, Had he been able, in his 
last hours, to speak what was in his heart, he might 
well have spoken what Bunyan puts into the mouth 
of Mr. Valiant— for Truth as he went down into the 
dark waters. The passage from the great prose-poet 
of England, which General Hawley quoted when he 
announced the death of General Sherman to the Sen- 
ate of the United States, may well linger in the minds 
of those who now, in this book, part company with 
Henry Ward Beecher. 

" When he understood it (that his summons had 
come) he called to his friends and told them of it. 
* Then,' said he, ' I am going to my fathers; and 
though, with great difficulty I got hither, yet I do not 
repent me of the trouble I have been at to arrive 
where I am. My sword I give to him who shall suc- 
ceed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill 
to him who can get them. My marks and scars I 
carry with me to be a witness for me that I have 

34 



530 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 

fought His battles who will now be my Redeemer.' 
When the day that he must go hence was come, many 
accompanied him to the river side, into which as he 
went he said, ' Death where is thy sting?' and as he 
went down deeper he said, ' Grave where is thy vic- 
tory?" So he passed over, and all the trumpets 

SOUNDED FOR HIM ON THE OTHER SIDE." 



INDEX. 



Abbott, Dr. Lyman, on the Friday-evening meetings, 136; 
characterization of Beecher's English speeches, 340; why 
Mr. Beecher was liable to misinterpretation, 397 ; on Mr, 
Beecher's faults, 458; Beecher's sermons philosophical, 501. 

Abolition merchants boycotted, 193, 

Adams's, Chas. Francis, compromise, 258. 

AUon, Rev. Dr., of London, and some parishioners study the 
Beecher trial, 395. 

American Anti-Slavery Society's meetings in New York 
broken up, 191. 

American Unitarian Association formed in 1825, 36. 

Amherst College and her greatest son, 44. 

Ancestry of Henry Ward Beecher, ia-12. 

Attendance at Plymouth Church, 120. 

Bacon, Dr. L, Moderator of National Advisory Committee, 

403. 
Battle in U. S. Congress over Clay's Compromise Act, 184. 
Beecher, Catherine, 21,30. 
Beecher, Charles, 23, 56, 139. 
Beecher Children, estimate of their mother, 4-7. 
Beecher, David, 11. 
Beecher, Edward, 21. 
Beecher, George, 21. 
Beecher, George, son of Henry Ward, Death and burial of, 94. 



532 INDEX. 

Beecher, Hannah, lo. 

Beecher, Henry Ward, birth of, 3; charactei* inheritance from 
his father and mother, 2, 3, 12; ancestors of, 3,4; reseni- 
blance to his mother, 4; finds the correspondence l)etween 
his father and mother, 5 ; childhood contemporaries, 15, 16; 
a compound of opposite characteristics, 16; childhood, 18- 
27; at school, 28-35; progress not satisfactory, 29; his love 
of nature, 31, 32; impressions of Sunday on the boy's mind, 
33-35 ; in Boston, 37-40 ; Mount Plaesant Institute, 40-43 ; 
in Amherst College, 44-54; engagement to Miss Eunice 
White BuUard, 49; occupations during college years, 50-51; 
enthusiasm for phrenology, 53-54; in Lane Theological 
Seminary, 55; lectures on temperance and phrenology, 58; 
editor of the Cincinnati Jour }ial, ^<)\ meditations recorded 
in an old journal, 60; manifestation of God, 63-67 ; gradu- 
ates from Lane Seminary, 69; call to Lawrenceburg, Ky., 69; 
marriage 73 ; early married life, 74 ; ordained, 76 ; call to 
Indianapolis, ']Z, 80 ; the Western evangelist, 80-91 ; life and 
methods at Indianapolis, 85-88 ; revivals, 89-91 ; a sick 
household, 92-94; editor of Farmer and Gardener, 95; 
sermons on slavery, 96, 97 ; lectures to young men, 98-103 ; 
call to Brooklyn, 104; addresses the American Home Mis- 
sionary Society in New York, 106 ; formation of Plymouth 
Church, 106 ; Plymouth Church organized, 107 ; invited to 
become its pastor, 107; accepts the call, 108; first sermon in 
Brooklyn, in; examination by the Council, in; publicly 
installed. Ill ; overflowing audiences, 116; speaks for the 
Edmonson sisters, 117, 118; review of beginnings of his 
ministry in Brooklyn, 119; church destroyed by fire, 119; 
new and larger church built, 120; a representative congre- 
gation, 121 ; relation to great national events, 123; services 
in Plymouth Church, 126; prayers in Plymouth Church, 128- 
130; the organ in Plymouth Church, 131 ; domestic sorrow, 
133; Friday-evening meetings, 133-137; social features, 137; 
morning prayer-meetings. 138; first voyage to England, 
138-144; return to America, 145; articles in New York 
Independent, 145 ; cordially welcomes Kossuth, 146 ; 



INDEX. 533 

revivals, 146-149; political and social reformer, 150; 
summers in the country, 1 51-152; the Plymouth Collection 
Hymn Book, 152-155; phenomenal genius and novel 
methods, 156; discourse on reporters, 157; causes of popu- 
larity and unpopularity, 156-162 ; battle for freedom, the, 
163-178; speeches on freedom, slavery, and the Civil War, 
168; article in The Independent,'' '^\i2i\\ we compromise?" 
179-184; on the duties to fugitive slaves, 186-188 : intense 
hatred in slavery circles against him, 189; Wendell Phillips, 
prevented speaking in New York, delivers his address in 
Plymouth Church, 1 91-192 ; speech before the American 
and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 194 ; attacks the Fugitive- 
Slave Law, 195-199 ; rebukes John Mitchell for his utterances 
on the slavery question, 205 ; the crisis, 207 ; lectures for the 
freedom of Kansas, 210-212 ; speaks against the assault 
committed on Chas. Sumner, 213 ; editorial in T/ie Inde- 
pendent, " On which side is peace ? " 217-220; enters actively 
the campaign of 1856,220-226; sermon on The Nation's 
Duty to Slavery, 228-237 ; collections in Plymouth Church, 
to free slaves, 238-245 ; helps in the election of Lincoln, 246 ; 
thanksgiving sermon after the election, 247-257 ; sermon on 
Jan. 4, 1861, 259-262; war, 264; a strange Sunday, 264; a 
great leader, 266 ; sermon preached during the siege of 
Sumter, 267-272 ; toiling for liberty and the Union, 273 ; 
sermon on The National Flag, 275-277 ; sermon on The 
Camp, Its Dangers, and Duties, 277 ; sermon on The Modes 
and Duties of Emancipation, 278-279 ; urges the Govern- 
ment to announce a clear anti-slavery programme, 281-286 ; 
visit to Europe in 1863, 287; receives news of the surrender 
of Vicksburg and Gettysburg in Paris, 293; urged to speak 
in England, 294 ; speech in Manchester, 299 ; in Glasgow, 
309; in Edinburgh, 317 ; in Liverpool, 320 ; in Exeter Hall, 
London, 330; end of the public campaign in England, 339 ; 
return to America, 345 ; receptions in Brooklyn and New 
York, 346 ; sails for Charleston with Garrison and others, 
349 ; address at the raising of the American flag over 
the walls of Fort Sumter, 350-354; opposed to humbling 



534 INDEX. 

the South, 356 ; lecture, " The North Victorious," 357 ; 
letter, disfavoring exclusion, to convention of soldiers and 
sailors at Cleveland, 358 ; resigns as editor of The Indepeji- 
dent, 358 ; addresses the Congregational Council of 1865, in 
Boston, 362 ; " Norvi^ood," 367; his marvelous power with 
words, 369; first course of twelve lectures on Preaching, in 
Yale College, 371 ; the silver wedding of Plymouth Church, 
372-379; the long darkness, 380; accused by Theodore Til- 
ton, 383 ; suffering during next four years, 385 ; Tilton pub- 
lishes a statement, 387 ; letter to committee of investigation, 
388; completely exonerated by committee, 390; meeting in 
Plymouth Church to adopt report, 391 ; Tilton begins action 
for damages in Brooklyn City Court, 393 ; jury disagrees, 
395 5 public opinion in favor of Beecher, 396-398 ; words to 
his congregation before meeting of Advisory Council, 402 ; 
meeting of Advisory Council, 402-413; address of welcome, 
403 ; examination by Council, 408 ; Plymouth Church sus- 
tained and its pastor held innocent, 412; lecture tours more 
frequent than formerly, 416; new light on old problems, 420; 
resigns his membership in the Congregational Association 
of Ministers in New York and Brooklyn, 421 ; statement of 
his theological opinions, 421-425 ; letter to Alfred Rose, 427; 
pulpit thunderer and plumed knight, 429-434; last visit to 
England, 435: enthusiastic receptions, 436 ; return to Brook- 
lyn, 442 ; stricken ill, 443 ; death, March 8, 1887, 444 ; funeral 
services, 445-449 ; Rev. Chas. H. Hall's sermon, 447 ; burial 
in Greenwood Cemetery, 448 : qualities that made him a 
MAN, 450-453 ; personal habits, 454 ,455 ; traits of character, 
456-464; his morbid streak, 465-467; " Boscobel," country 
residence in Peekskill, 467, 468 ; a lover of books and pic- 
tures, 468, 469; fondness for jewels and music, 469; wit and 
humor, 470-472 ; sociability, 472-474 ; as a letter-writer, 
474, 475; the eloquent orator, 478-489; the preacher of 
Christ, 490-512 ; unveiling of statue in Brooklyn, 513,514; 
the fertility of his mind, 517; his oratorical genius, 517-519; 
preacher of the fundamental truths of Christianity, 519-526; 
literary work, 527, 528 ; a life worth studying, -28-530. 



INDEX. 535 

Beecher, John, lo. 

Beecher, Joseph, ii, 

Beecher, Lyman, last words to his dying wife, i ; king of the 
New England pulpit, 8; striking eccentricities of character, 
9; ancestry of, 10-12 ; preacher in East Hampton, L. I., 13; 
way of treating itinerant Methodist preachers, 13 ; as a boy, 
15; marries Miss Harriet Porter, 21; pastor of Hanover 
Street Congregational Church, Boston, 36; president of 
Lane Theological Seminary and removal to Cincinnati, 55 
students' exodus on account of his " slavery position," 58 
meets his eleven children, 59 ; death of his second wife, 60 
trials and tribulations, 61-63 ! death, 2. 

Beecher, Nathaniel, 11. 

Beecher, Roxana Foote, dedicates her sons missionaries of 
Christ, I ; death of, 2 ; loved by her children, 4-7 ; her 
womanly qualities and charms, 6. 

Beecher, Thomas K., 32, 39. 

Bennett, James Gordon, editorials on the slavery question, 191, 

Birth of Henry Ward Beecher, 3. 

Birth of leaders in anti-slavery struggle and Civil War, 15^ 

Blaine, James G,, 156, 429. 

Bowen, Henry C, 106, loS, 192, 193. 

Boyhood of Henry Ward Beecher, 18-35. 

Bright, John, 133. 

Brooklyn. New York, Beecher called to, 104. 

Brooks, Phillips, compared with Beecher, 156, 493-494. 

Brooks, Preston S., assaults Sumner, 212. 

Brown's, John, attack on Harper's Ferry, 228. 

Bullard, Eunice White, future wife of Henry Ward Beecher, 49, 

Burial of Henry Ward Beecher in Greenwood Cemetery, 448. 

Bushnell, Horace, 3. 

Cable, Geo. W., 450, 

Calhoun, John C, 179. 

Call to Brooklyn, 104. 

Causes of popularity and unpopularity 156-162. 

Celebrities of anti-slavery struggle, birth of, 15. 



53^ INDEX. 

Childhood contemporaries of Henry Ward Beecher, 15, 16. 

Childhood of Henry Ward Beecher, 18-3$. 

Clark, James Freeman, 199. 

Clay's Compromise Act, Battle in United States Congress over, 

184. 
College days of Henry Ward Beecher, 44, 55. 
Cook, Joseph, on Beecher as a reformer, 163; summary of result 

of Beecher's trial, 381 ; on Beecher in England, 514. 
Cunningham, J. L., Beecher's influence on Great Britain as a 

nation, 341. 
Cutter, William T., 105, 106. 

Davenport, W. E., 525. 

Death of Henry Ward Beecher, 444. 

Dickens, Chas., praises Plymouth Church as an audience-room, 

125. 
Dickinson, Anna, speaks in Plymouth Church, 160. 
Douglass, Frederick, speaks in Plymouth Church, 193. 
Douglas, Stephen A., proposes to repeal Missouri Compromise, 

205. 

Edmonson sisters freed and educated, 117, 118. 

England, Beecher's first voyage to, 138-144; second voyage to, 
287-344 ; last voyage to, 435-441. 

Evarts, William M., speaks against assault on Charles Sum- 
ner, 213. 

Family reunion, 59. 

Father of the man, 28. 

Finney, Charles G., meetings of Anti-Slavery Society in New 

York broken up, 191. 
Foote, Elisha, father of Roxana Foote Beecher, 3. 
Freedom, battle for, 163-178. 
Fremont, John C, nominated for President, 216. 
Friday-night talks, 133-137. 

Fugitive-Slave Law attacked by Beecher, 195-199. 
Funeral services on the death of Henry Ward Beecher, 445- 

449- 



INDEX. 537 

Garrison, William Lloyd, i68. 

Gladstone, William E,, on progress of civilization, 120. 
Greeley, Horace, takes council with Beecher, 238. 
Green, Rev. Beriah, first presiding officer of American Anti- 
Slavery Society, 164. 

Hale, David, 106. 

Hall, Newman, 341, 519. 

Hall, Rev. Chas. H., conducts the funeral service on death of 

Henry Ward Beecher, 445. 
Haweis, Rev. H. R., estimate of Beecher, 515. 
Hill, Rev. James L., 527. 
Historic church. A, 117. 
Hitchcock, Prof. Roswell D., 518. 
Hopkins, Dr. Mark, on Mr. Beecher's advocacy of the union 

cause in England, 518. 
Howard, John R., on Mr. Beecher's great learning, i6i ; on 

his truthfulness, 409. 
Howard, John T., 106, 108. 

Hudson, Frederick, on Beecher as a great leader, 266. 
Hunt, Richard M., architect of Beecher's monument, 514. 
Humphrey, Dr, Heman, president of Amherst College, 44. 

In the great valley of decision, 55. 

Jay, William, 164. 

Kossuth in America, 200. 

Lane Theological Seminary, Henry Ward Beecher at, 55. 

Lawrenceburg, Ky., 72. 

Leaders in anti-slavery struggle and Civil War, Birth of, 15. 

Leaders of religious and political reform in 1847, 113. 

Leading preachers of Brooklyn in 1846, no. 

Lectures to young men, 98-103. 

Lenox, Mass., Beecher's farm, 151. 

Liddon, Canon, 126. 

Light in America's dark age, a, 189. 

Lincoln nominated for President, 245 ; elected President, 247. 



53^ INDEX. 

Lind, Jenny, Beecher's opinion of, 145. 

Litchfield, Conn., birthplace of Henry Ward Beecher, 19; 

Sunday at, 33. 
Lowell, James Russell, in England, 343. 

Marriage of Henry Ward Beecher, 73. 

Merrill's, Dr. J. G., Description of Congregational Council of 

1865, 361. 
Merriman, George S., 492. 
Ministry, The private and peaceful, 132. 
Missouri Compromise repealed, 208. 
Mitchell's, John, idea of liberty, 204. 
Moody, D wight L., 137. 
Murphy, Francis, estimate of Beecher, 496. 

New England pulpit, The king of the, 8. 
New England, residences of distinguished divines, 18, 
New England womanhood. The flower of, i. 
New lights on old problems, 420. 

Opening of new Plymouth Church, 120. 
Ordination of Henry Ward Beecher, 76. 
Outline of a sermon, 507. 

Parker, Dr. Joel, threatens to sue Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe 

for libel, 203. 
Parker, Theodore, tribute to motherhood, 7. 
Parton's, James, description of Beecher in his lecture-room, 

134- 
Peril and escape. The boy's, 36. 
Phillips, Wendell, extract of sermon on the death of, 46; the 

Abolition leader. 167 ; speaks in Plymouth Church, 191, 192. 
Pierrepont, Edward, on the fertility of Mr. Beecher's mind, 517. 
Plymouth Church, formation of, 106; organized, 107; Henry 

Ward Beecher installed as pastor, in; destroyed by fire, 

119; rebuilt, 120; representative congregation, 121; relation 



INDEX. 539 

of, and its pastor, to great national events, 123; description 
124; services, 126; prayers, 128-130; the organ, 131; Fri- 
day-evening meetings, 133-137; social features, 137; morn- 
ing prayer-meetings, 138; training and growth, 132-138; 
Anna Dickinson speaks in, 160; Wendell Phillips speaks in, 
191-192; Frederick Douglass speaks in, 193 ; collections to 
free slaves, 238-245 ; the silver wedding, 372-379 ; meeting 
to adopt report of committee of investigation of Mr. 
Beecher's conduct, 391; meeting of National Advisory Council, 
402-413; sustained by Council, 412; Henry Ward Beecher's 
body lies in state, 446 ; funeral services, 446-449. 

Plymouth Collection Hymnal, The, 152. 

Popularity and unpopularity. Causes of, 156-162. 

Porter, Pres. Noah, letter to Mr. Beecher, 390. 

Pratt, N. D., reminiscenses, 159, 221, 241, 243, 347, 393, 415, 
430, 460, 464, 466, 472. 

Private and peaceful ministry, The, 132. 

Pulpit, A strong, 92. 

Pulpit ihunderer and plumed knight, 429. 

Raymond, Henry J., speaks at Woodstock Commons, Conn., 
221 ; takes counsel with Beecher, 238. 

Raymond, Rossiter W., estimates of Mr. Beecher's character, 
405. 409, 510. 

Revivals, at Indiar.p-])olis, 89; early, 104; conduct of, philoso- 
phy of, subject to law, 146-149. 

Robertson, Rev. Frederick W., 40. 

Sage, Henry W., founder of the Lyman Beecher Lectureship 
of Yale College, 371. 

Salisbury, Conn., Vacation at, 151. 

Scott, Benjamin, chairman of the Exeter Hall meeting, Lon- 
don. 330. 

Schaff, Dr. Philip, letter to Beecher, 425. 

School-days of Henry Ward Beecher, 28-35. 

Shearman, Thomas G., 400. 

Sick household. A, 92. 



540 INDEX. 

Spurgeon, Chas. Haddon, compared with Beecher, 126, 490, 
491. 

Statement of Beecher's theological opinions, 421. 

Storrs, Dr. R. S., preaches the sermon on organization of 
Plymouth Church, 107; on Mr. Beecher's influence in Eng- 
land, 329. 

Stowe, Prof. Calvin E., brother-in-law to Henry Ward Beecher, 
56. 

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, description of her m.other, 4, 5 ; 
recollections of Henry Ward at funeral of his mother, 21 ; 
at school with Henry Ward, 28; the West and Henry Ward, 
83; educates the Edmonson sisters, 118; publication of 
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," 200, 203; letter to George Eliot, 396; 
another letter regarding her brother, 397. 

Sumner, Chas., enters the Senate, 201 ; assaulted by Preston 
S. Brooks, 212. 

Sunday in the Beecher home, 33. 

Talmage, T. DeWitt, 126. 

Taylor, Dr. Wm. M., on Mr. Beecher's eloquence, 327. 

Testing his weapons, 69. 

Thatcher, Moses, first appeal of Anti-Slavery Society written 
by, 164. 

Theological celebrities of 1837, 71. 

Thompson, Joseph P., speaks at Congregational Council of 
1865, 361. 

Tilton, Theodore, accuses Mr. Beecher, 383; publishes a state- 
ment, 387; begins action for damages in Brooklyn City 
Court, 393 ; jury disagrees, 395. 

Training and growth of Plymouth Church, 132-138. 

United States of America, condition of the, in 1837, 70. 

Ward, Andrew, 4. 

Warner, Chas. Dudley, opinion of Mr. Beecher's intellectual 
brilliancy, 483. 



INDEX. 541 

Willcox, Prof. George B., on Mr. Beecher as the foremost 
preacher of this continent, 495. 

Wright, Rev. Wm. Burnet, regarding Mr. Beecher's thorough- 
ness of study, 456. 

Yale Lectures on Preaching, 9, 132, 135, 139, 146, 154, 371. 



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